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Voice mail a form of mobile communication?

Some food for thought from a CNET interview with Keiichi Enoki, Executive Vice President at NTT DoCoMo, regarding how i-mode has been adopted in the US.

I have been guilty of wondering whether the slow up take of wireless internet services in North America isn't due to the fact that Americans go everywhere by car, whereas Japanese (and to some extent Europeans) spend more time on public transport, where they can do some time-killing surfing or texting. As Enoki rightly points out, that is a very Tokyo-centric view of Japan. If you go outside of Tokyo, everyone drives. He says 50% of Japanese households have two cars. Which also supports something that Hofstede said at his talk which I had doubts about at the time. Japan is classified as a very masculine culture in Hofstede's analysis, and he said during the talk that one of the indicators of a masculine culture is a high percentage of two car households, one for the man, one for the woman. I (despite having lived outside of Tokyo) had doubts that this was true for Japan, but, it would seem it is.

Enoki also says that North America is behind in wireless uptake because of their resistance to governments dictating standardization (unlike Japan and Europe). He also argues that because voice mail is very developed in the US, (and virtually non-existent in Japan), Americans have become accustomed to using voice mail as a type of mobile communication, so presumably felt less urgency in using mobile calls and texting. This point also links, it seems to me, with his analysis that the US operators mostly thought about the business market when developing wireless services and handsets, whereas DoCoMo and others focused on the consumer market.

Hofstede on communication technology adoption

SIETAR UK (Society for Intercultural Education Training and Research) had a 'Business of Culture' conference on March 12th in London, at which one of the founders of the discipline, Geert Hofstede, spoke. From the various notes I scribbled on his handouts, the points that struck me most were:

- What keeps multinational companies together is shared practices, not shared values. Practices consist of symbols, heroes and rituals. Similar practices can be learned by people with very different values. Values are the mental programmes we acquire in our formative years. Given sufficient effort, practices can be changed (and values not?)

- There has never been any study or proof that showing that national cultures change, so it does not matter if Hofstede's data is from the 1960s/1970s. He later said that national cultures do sometimes shift - particularly on the individual versus collectivist dimension, but that these shifts tend to happen across most cultures at once, so the relative position of each culture does not change.

- Organizational cultures cannot be described with national culture dimensions. Differences between national cultures are anthropological, between organisational cultures sociological.

- Hofstede's Uncertainty Avoidance dimension should not be confused with attitudes to risk. In fact, in cultures where uncertainty avoidance is high, his research shows that there is more religiosity, xenophobia, identity card obligation, faster driving and in general more 'neurosis'.

- Looking at research into consumer behaviour in 15 EU countries 1970-2000, he judges that adoption of new communication technology is not influenced by national wealth, but is slower where uncertainty avoidance is stronger. (I wonder about Japan, where uncertainty avoidance is high, but adoption of mobile technology was very fast). There are lasting differences in what the internet is used for. Feminine cultures use the internet more than masculine for education, leisure, chatting. Small power distance cultures use the internet more than large power distance cultures for business. Weak uncertainty avoidance cultures us the internet more than high uncertainty avoidance cultures for mail. So Nordic cultures, which are small power distance, weak uncertainty avoidance and feminine, use the internet for all these things.

- consumer behaviour in EU countries diverges once a product is no longer scarce. For example, when a country becomes richer, everyone buys a car. But in more masculine cultures, it becomes common to buy two cars, one for the man, one for the woman. Consumers have not become 'globalized' in their behaviour because of increasing wealth. However it could be argued that individualism is related to wealth. But Hofstede would argue that the causation is from wealth to individualism rather than individualism creating wealth. In other words, he would say we need to fight poverty if we want to promote human rights/individualism, rather than promote individualism/human rights as a way of fighting poverty.

- he also asked us to remember in our training that his IBM data comes from surveys not interviews and from employees, not managers only.

- finally, he really hates Trompenaars (and by association Charles Hampden Turner), some of the other leading lights in intercultural theory. I had heard this before, but it was fun to see it! "Never guilty of original thought!" "Quack" "A quack's assistant!" "Just blah blah!"

Content King Wrong

A rightly annoyed article by Mike Masnick on TheFeature lamenting the reappearance of the 'content is king' mantra at a recent wireless conference. As he says it's 'the "broadcast" model of content creation. It's about getting "the talent" to entertain "the masses." If there's one thing the Internet has shown over the years, it's that "the masses" can entertain each other quite well.'

Which seems a good moment to link to this AP story about novels on mobiles taking off in Japan (like I've been saying for, oh, about four years now), and the following quote:

Yoshi, a former prep-school instructor who sees his readers as "a community," reads the dozens of e-mail messages teenage fans send him daily and uses their material for story ideas.
He also knows immediately when readers are getting bored and changes the plot when access tallies start dipping for his stories.
"It's like playing live music at a club," he said. "You know right away if the audience isn't responding, and you can change what you're doing right then and there."

Neta

The article in TheFeature by Howard Rheingold reminds me of how important neta is in establishing credibility in Japanese society - and that I must incorporate this point into my training. He talks about the research (pdf file link) done by Keisuke Okabe of Keio University into how Japanese people use the photos they take on their mobile phones as a social currency - taking pictures of something they can then show their friends - a cute dog, an interesting urban landscape detail, something they cooked, a trick played on a drunk friend, their new haircut.

'Social currency' is my loose way to translate neta - in my dictionary it is translated as 'material' as in for a novel or a news article. It mentions the American slang expression 'dope', as in 'get the dope on something'. Other meanings given are 'proof', 'trick' or even ingredients for food. Social currency is important in any society but I wish that there was more appreciation by Japanese working with Europeans that Europeans might have useful neta and conversely perhaps Europeans should be more forthcoming about the neta that they have to their Japanese colleagues. It would help build trust and respect.

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