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Cultural influences on mobile data services

A paper that exactly deals with my area of interest - A Qualitative Cross-National Study of Cultural Influences on Mobile Data Service Design by Boreum Choi, Inseong Lee, Jinwoo Kim and Yunsuk Jeon, of Yonsei University in Korea and University of Helsinki (link to pdf). Summarised by Mark Frauenfelder on TheFeature.

First interesting statement:
"It should also be noted that, as use of mobile data services has spread globally,cultural factors have had a stronger effect on their use than on the use of traditional stationary Internet applications. This is because mobile devices are designed to interface with wireless networks that operate only in local areas, whereas devices that access the stationary Internet are globally uniform."

I suppose a PC is a PC wherever you go but I'm still pondering on this one. Is it the device that dictates the use of mobile data services? The interface is something else surely. Or should one regard them as a whole? And Sharp and other Japanese mobile device manufacturers are trying to come up with devices that can be used globally. Is this just a neutral way of saying that mobile applications are more culturally specific because Microsoft Windows has not achieved world domination in mobile applications (yet)? Or are they trying to say that the devices are designed with the local content on local wireless networks in mind - which is true up till now - although Vodafone are trying to be global in network, device and interface . I found that in Japan it was a bit of everything - everyone in the supply chain (browser suppliers, handset manufacturers, operators, content and application providers) worked together, so it was rather difficult to say who influenced who or determined what.

I like the term they have borrowed that technologies and online services are 'cultural amplifiers'.

The authors provide some useful summaries of other research. Apparently in a comparative survey of Chinese and American software developers, the Chinese developers performed better within an iconic or pictorial mode whereas their American counterparts were more successful in an alphanumerical mode. Which would tie in with their cultures being characterised as high context and low context respectively. Similarly, another survey showed that German mobile phone users prioritized clearly written and comprehensive user manuals whereas Chinese users cared more about the quality of pictorial information.

Some other research on website design showed that high uncertainty avoidance countries prefer restricted options and simple controls, while low uncertainty avoidance countries prefer multiple options and complex controls.

They interviewed 24 people in Korea, Japan and Finland, eight from each country, which they admit is rather few. The Japanese were a mix of students and housewives whereas the Koreans also included some business people. The Finns were mostly students with one housewife and one systems engineer. They identified 52 attributes of mobile data services and related them to Hofstede's four cultural dimensions. They asked the interviewees to download ringtones and play them, download and play a game, reserve a movie ticket and read sports news.

Overall one attribute was mentioned by all participants, which was 'minimal steps or keystrokes', in order to save time. I guess this is why the researchers concluded that all the participants are monochronic rather than polychronic. The researchers wrongly say that Edward T. Hall classifies Europeans as polychronic and Asian as monochronic. Hall actually distinguishes between Northern Europeans (monochronic) and Southern Europeans (polychronic). Asians are usually considered as being more polychronic. Hall says Japanese are polychronic at work, when they are taking group relations into account, but monochronic outside of work. So you would expect the Finnish to be monochronic and also that the Japanese, who were not at work as they were students and housewives, to be more monochronic. Koreans are usually classified as polychronic, so it is interesting that they are not when using mobile data services.

The researchers also found that Korean and Japanese participants had a greater tendency than the Finnish to avoid the ambiguous and reject unusual ideas, which confirms the Hofstede finding that Japanese and Koreans have high uncertainty avoidance compared to the Finnish. Japanese and Korean participants preferred to have secondary and unhyped information about site content whereas Finnish participants thought such information was useless, including rankings.

I found it surprising that the Japanese participants came out as individualistic along with the Finnish. They say this is because although the Japanese participants preferred a wide variety of options for content (eg difficulty level for games, chord for ringtone, seat selection for movies) due to uncertainty avoidance they did not like a wide variety of content - lots of games, movie theaters, ringtones to choose from because it interfered with individualistic goals. I am not at all sure this is an indicator of individualism. You might say that being an individualist means wanting a variety to choose from, because you believe your tastes cannot be met by a limited choice? I wonder whether this kind of judgement is not coloured by the Korean researchers own collectivist tendencies?

The high context versus low context conclusions seem a lot more unarguable. The Japanese and Korean participants preferred to have an iconic menu style and a variety of font colours and sizes, whereas the Finns disliked this, preferring a mono colour, text oriented screen.

Suppressing that emotion

Joi Itoh notices this New York Times article picked up on Gen Kanai's blog and wonders if there is any link between the lack of expressed emotion in Finnish and Japanese societies and the fact that both countries have been such enthusiastic adopters of mobile phones.

Obviously one point, made in the comments, is that mobile phones allow people to contact each other in a very intimate-seeming way without showing emotion face to face. Although as another commenter notes, it may also be related to the fact the both societies are highly literate, so comfortable with communicating by text.

From the cross cultural consulting work I did last year for a Japanese engineer working in Finland, I would say the Finnish emotional suppression comes across as more cold and dour than that of the Japanese - there is a distinct lack of smiles and the elaborate rituals of hospitality and politeness that you would find as a newcomer to Japan and it makes Japanese people feel very uncomfortable initially.

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.

Dead ant

When I conducted a training programme for a Japanese engineer seconded to Nokia in Finland in September last year, one of the presenters characterised the typical Finn employee as a "solitary worker ant" but I think this might be taking a national stereotype a bit too far!