Advanced Micro Devices commissioned a survey from Benchmark Research in September of this year to back their belief that the centre of our digital home is the PC, not the mobile phone or hand held organizer. I can't find the original survey but a summary of the results is given by an article in the International Herald Tribune and also The Inquirer.
The respondents were over 500 home PC users from Sweden, Germany, France, the UK and Italy.
When asked which digital device they would most willingly give up, only 1 percent said they would give up their PC, and most opted to chuck their personal digital assistants out , although the British were the most reluctant to bin their PDAs (not this Brit. Biggest waste of 300 quid I ever spent). Landline phones were also high on the list of least wanted, with the Germans being most attached to their landlines. The French and Italians valued their digital music players, the Italians and Swedes their mobile phones and the French and Italians most wanted to keep their digital cameras. So the British are the road warriors, the Germans the homebodies and the Italians and French living up to their artistic stereotype?
The Italian respondents were the most likely to be offended by people sending large or badly formatted files according to the International Herald Tribune interpretation (The Inquirer read the research as being about badly formatted e-mails) and were the most eager for help with digital etiquette (82% saying they would appreciate it, compared to the average of 56%). The French were the most concerned about how they were perceived every time they send something, and the Germans and Swedes the least concerned. So the high context cultures (French and Italian) worry about the hidden messages in the way that electronic communications look whereas the low context German and Swedes don't see any hidden messages, and believe that what counts are the words themselves, however badly formatted or presented.
More confirmation of cultural stereotypes: The French don't like the fact people can get hold of them more easily (high power distance) while Brits and Swedes complain most about the time they waste waiting for the computer to do what it's told (so are the most monochronic).
According to a Business Week article the French are the keenest bloggers in terms of number of blogs as a percent of the total population - 4.9%. It's 1.4% for the British, 3.5% for the Dutch and 0.2% for the Germans. Even American bloggers only make up 3% of the US population.
Loic Le Meur, founder of Ublog.com says it's because "French people love to tell everyone exactly what's on their minds - far more than Germans, for example." I would add to this that they also like to have a really good argument about it too, and the comments on a blog provide an excellent venue for that.
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Ton Zylstra (Interdependent Thoughts weblog, http://www.zylstra.org/blog) sent me this comment which he was not able to post (I'm sorry, I still haven't been able to fix the problem that has led to my disabling the comments):
Those numbers come from my partner Elmine (http://elmine.wijnia.com/ ) who added them to the wiki of Loïc when he asked numbers for the European blogosphere. She took the estimated totals in those wiki-pages for all countries mentioned and divided them by the number of inhabitants (those numbers taken from the CIA Factbook website) So all percentages are speculative at best, as the number of blogs in any country remains speculative (France's position is due to 2.4 million blogs at Skyblog, a contested figure e.g.). Also note that this list only covers European countries, not what's happening in Asia for instance.
You can find the whole list here:
http://www.socialtext.net/loicwiki/index.cgi?summary_page
I guess this survey result means Germans are rather more, erm, polychronic than I thought.
Netimperative is spinning this story about a survey done by comScore Networks to mean that as British people use search engines more often than other countries, they are confused or lazy about using the net. As a search engine addict, I think it is more about a large number of British people being knowledge workers, and also having a strong tradition of research, as well as being plain old nosy about other people. But then the French, who are also quite 'high context' and therefore like to know the background of people, use search engines significantly less often than the Brits.
They only surveyed five countries, but it was interesting too to note that Google was by far and away the most popular search engine for the UK, France, Germany and Canada, and it was only in the USA that Yahoo was anything like a close second.
A quotation from Betrand Russell appears as an epigraph at the beginning of the book I am currently reading - John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure.
"My German engineer, I think, is a fool. He thinks nothing empirical is knowable - I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room, but he wouldn't."
Lanchester doesn't reveal who this German engineer is (at least not so far in my reading of the book) - it turns out it's Wittgenstein.
I wonder if there's a PhD thesis out there on the influence of cultural background on a philosopher's work?
There seems to be a great deal of difference in people's willingness to pay for outsourced data and research, depending on their cultural background.
It is well known that employees in German companies value their own status as 'experts' and therefore when presented with an issue requiring data, will go off and do their own research in some depth in order to reach an informed decision.
What I hadn't realised was that it is therefore very difficult to find any generally available sector wide databases in Germany. Each company does their own research and does not value publicly shared data. This may in part be due to Germany being a low context nation. High context cultures are much more likely to share information inside and outside a company. But other companies from low context cultures such as the US and the UK seem willing to outsource and pay large sums of money for research. This may have something to do with their monochronic 'time is money' attitudes, although Germans are also quite monochronic. British and Americans are less concerned with guarding their status as experts too, perhaps.
Japanese companies are different again, in that they have plenty of industry association databases and shared information to draw on for overall data, but are not prepared to pay very much for this. They also tend not to commission expensive in-depth analyses, believing that it is their role as business people to get close enough to customers, suppliers and other people in their networks to be able to get their own in-depth gut feel about what is going on. Obviously this is part of being in a high context culture too. Japanese employees also tend to be generalists rather than specialists, and regularly move across functions and market sectors within a company.
The high/low context dimension and the polychronic/monochronic dimension therefore do not on their own explain willingnesses to pay for different levels of data and research.
It may be that the time orientation dimension also has to be factored in. Germans weight the past more in decision making, so feel it is necessary to back up decisions with analyses of, for example, the past 5 years of sales. The Americans are very future oriented, so don't want to spend too much time looking at past data but are keen to bring in outside analyst views on what past data might predict about the future. The Japanese are present and future oriented, but pay little attention to the past in making decisions, so they want to know what is going on right now, but as external data will always be a little behind, they want to back it up with their own immediate impressions from talking to other people in their industry.
Each approach has its problems it seems to me. I remember when I had just taken over the sales of particular building material in Japan, and suddenly a key customer turned round and said they did not want to purchase any more from us because we were too expensive. It was completely unexpected to the team leader and my predecessor, but after I went back and pulled out all the files from previous years and put together the data in spreadsheet (which noone had done before!), the gradual decline in sales became very apparent - the customer had been losing interest for some time.
Similarly, if the various players in a sector do not have some kind of easy and cheap mechanism for sharing information and getting a general view on how the industry is moving, it is difficult to build the kind of mutually supportive ecosystem that enabled, for example, the Japanese wireless data market to develop.
I posted an article on my official consulting website explaining why videoconferencing doesn't work between different cultures. The same can be said for conference calls, much favoured by US multinationals. A Japanese manager pointed out to me last week that not only do high context cultures dislike them because they can't see the other person's body language, but also that even people from more low context cultures can wreck their efficacy. He said conference calls at his US/German chemicals company regularly grind to a halt when a German participant disagrees on a very narrow point in his area of expertise, then goes off on this tangent at great length, totally throwing the US HQ boss, who only has a thin overall grasp of all the issues.