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Mobile norms

A letter to the Times last month said that it is "perfectly normal" to see people using wireless in meetings to answer e-mails (and uses the word "polychronic" which I thought was a word usually confined to interculturalist circles!) and sets down some new rules:
- a text is merely an urgent request for information so should be replied to without delay
- if a caller rings once sends it to an answerphone, twice and it's probably urgent so answer it, if it's not urgent call them back after the meeting
- it's normal not to have a desk phone and your work mobile has two lines, one personal one business

"this is the culture I live with day to day and it is accepted as normal, not rude", the letter concludes.

Which makes me wonder, as I have not been part of a large corporate workplace for 6 years now, what is normal, what is rude? Whose culture? I ask participants in each company I do training in what their attitude is to mobiles on in meetings etc, and I get a different answer each time.

Mobile meeting manners

Etiquette advice from T-Mobile, whose survey shows that the British are hypocrites about the use of mobiles, Blackberries, laptops etc in meetings - hating other people doing it, but doing it themselves.

Nearly three quarters of employers do not have guidelines on the use of mobiles at work, which shows how is assumed, wrongly, there are generally held norms regarding the use of communications technology, without any conscious effort to surface the assumptions being made, and turn them into explicit rules.

1. Ensure your mobile phone is off or on silent mode during meetings
2. Do not answer calls during meetings
3. Do not send text messages during meetings
4. Do not leave your mobile device on the table in vibrate mode
5. If you are expecting an important call during a meeting, let the participants know at the beginning of the meeting. When you receive the call, discreetly excuse yourself from the room
6. Ask yourself: “Do I really need my mobile device for the time period of this meeting or can I leave it behind?”
7. Leave laptops closed during meetings. Only open laptops if resources are needed to support the meeting
8. Don’t check emails on either BlackBerry devices or laptops during meetings. If necessary, turn on ‘Out of Office’ to alert those emailing you that you will be in a meeting and are unable to respond immediately
9. Remember to take your phone with you if you leave your desk, or turn the phone off or onto silent mode
10. Ask your employer or HR department to provide a policy on the appropriate use of mobile devices in your workplace

Russians not chatty

...on their mobile phones, despite high mobile phone penetration rates, and apparently they don't text much either, but seem to be interested in downloads.

Japanese number portability

If you needed any further evidence on how much Japanese people use their phones for e-mail (not texting), then the survey from September 2006 from Nikkei Business (subscription required) should convince. Despite number portability being introduced, only 18.2% of the 1011 respondents are considering switching providers, and the main reason (45%) given is that switching will change their e-mail address. The second most popular reason (just over 40%) is that the friends and family are with the same provider, and a close third is that they are satisfied with their current provider's service. Of those that are considering switching, KDDI (au) is the provider that most (61.1%) are thinking of switching to.

Chinese mobile search

Research from mInfo, China's leading mobile search provider, on what Chinese search for. It does not differ greatly from other countries, except perhaps that searching for jokes and riddles is more popular in China than I have seen elsewhere.

Mobile ID theft

The downside to mobile phones becoming your primary way onto the web and a credit card - when they're stolen, it's rather as if someone stole your PC if you were living in the UK or US.

Bill Morrow of Vodafone Japan

The question that I and others who know about Japan and the mobile industry always ask is whether it is cultural barriers that are preventing the same sophistication of handsets, content and services that you see in Japan being adopted elsewhere.

Bill Morrow, of Vodafone Japan, was interviewed in the January 6th edition of the main business magazine in Japan, Nikkei Business, as part of an article on why Japanese handset manufacturers (NEC, Sharp, Toshiba) aren't doing so well outside their domestic market. He seems to be saying there isn't a cultural barrier, however he does point to one of the factors that I and others often highlight, which is the way that Japanese companies in the same supply chain collaborate very easily (Wa no seishin, or 'the spirit of harmony') when someone comes up with an idea like an electronic purse, to launch the new feature.

He says that he has no doubt consumers in Europe are just as interested in electronic purses or mobile phones with better music playing capability but at the moment their main criteria for buying a phone are voice and messaging capabilities. He does however point out that the needs of businesspeople when it comes to mobile phones are the same in Spain or the UK or Japan. He seems optimistic that Sharp and Toshiba are making the right preparations for bringing about a change in the rest of the world's attitudes to mobile phones.

Needing control

Blog backlog 3. More from the Financial Times mobility issue of November 12 2005.

The final article in the mobility issue was about people who choose to cut themselves off from e-mail or not to have a mobile phone. It focuses on Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, who now routes e-mail through his assistant and Jonathan Liebenau, a senior lecturer in Information Systems, who chooses not to have a mobile phone and asks students and colleagues to e-mail him instead. As the writer says, it is about which particular dragon you wish to control.

It also seems to me about how people view and manage their networks. Sen stopped trying to deal with his e-mail because of the overwhelming number that came in after he won the Nobel Prize. Liebenau feels e-mail is better than people asking quick casual questions face to face, because such questions are better articulated in written form and better dealt with by him as an e-mail response. I suspect that Sen is far more relationship focused than Liebenau, and felt panicked by the volume of e-mails because of the number of relationships that might potentially need nurturing that it represented. Liebenau is far more task focused, and presumably is not going to waste time in e-mails building a relationship.

Personally I (secretly I hope) react badly to calls coming in via mobile phone or work phone, feeling it is an intrusion of my privacy or flow of work. I use e-mail all the time though, both to build relationships and to get task related questions dealt with. Having said that, I often use the phone to talk to customers because I think I get better idea of what their true reaction or wants are and also to talk to colleagues in more relationship oriented countries like Spain or Italy.

Wireless promotes the market economy in Kenya

Blog backlog 2. More from the FT mobility issue of November 12 2006.

The point that many developing countries are leapfrogging fixed line problems and adopting mobile telephony has been made many times. The article in the FT had interest for me beyond that in its description of how ordinary Kenyans have been able to enter the market economy (and escape state sector corruption) thanks to mobile phones. One woman uses hers to run her freelance mobile massage service. Another uses it to find out what the market prices for her vegetables were before transporting them there. Another has added on a phone booth business to his one man tailoring business and is dreaming of hiring another tailor, reinvesting any cash he makes into credit for the phone booth, instead of frittering it away as he used to.

Operators have adapted to local market conditions by providing services such as texting commodity prices to farmers and allowing one user to text airtime to another.

FT mobility issue

Blog backlog. First up, FT magazine's mobility issue from November 12 2005. No link.

A graduate student from the Philippines was surprised at the lack of texting among his American friends in the Philippines he was accustomed to getting and sending dozens of messages a day. "If I've been to sleep and don't have at least four messages when I wake up, I feel no one loves me". Teens in the UK are similar I think.

According to Glenn Woroch, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, most technologies become less widely used as they reach a bigger sphere of people, but this has not been the case with mobile phones. The amount of time the average person spends with his or her mobile is going up.

Another difference in the spread of mobile communications is that many of the technologies associated with it were not created for business use first. Looking at how most Japanese teenagers use their mobiles suggests to the journalist that pervasive communications are strengthening social bonds, not breaking them down. Japanese teenagers expect messages to be returned immediately or at least within 30 minutes, or a social convention has been violated. Forgetting to take your mobile with your or letting the battery die are also social misdemeanours. Messages are also used to pave the way from virtual to real communication, for example phoning or meeting someone.

The journalist wonders whether business executives are as happy to be permanently connected. Leaving your BlackBerry behind or letting the battery die would be their social faux pas. I've certainly noticed in the past year that there is less need to warn people about switching off their mobiles, but a lot more surreptitious BlackBerry checking in my seminars. But it is very industry specific, and does not seem to be culturally related. Middle managers in IT/electronics or sales/purchasing roles are particularly prone to leaving their phones or BlackBerries on and checking them or letting them ring and checking the names, even when in face to face meetings. Japanese, Germans and British all lament this tendency.

Woroch says that leaving all communication channels open and checking them is setting too low a price on a scarce resource - access to a worker's time. Polychronic people don't have quite such a strong sense that there is a time scarcity of course so may feel less like there should be a high price. Interestingly it is an academic from polychronic Italy who laments the way that time is socially perceived as something that must be filled up to the very last folds, and that we are eliminating the positive aspects of lost time.

Cultural differences in mobile phone usage

A survey by Surfkitchen on mobile phone usage uncovers some differences between Germany, USA, Italy, China, UK, Spain and Japan. Rather frustratingly, further analysis of the results is not possible because they don't even have the full report on their site, so we have to go on the press release. One comment I can make is that it is notable how the most relationship oriented cultures on the list (China and Italy) completely rely on their mobile phones to maintain those relationships.

Intercultural netiquette

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).

Nigerian GSM culture

An article which only just reached me from the Jan-Mar 2004 BBC Focus on Africa magazine by Sola Odunfa, lamenting the death of the traditional Nigerian phone conversation, thanks to the high charges per minute for mobile phone conversation. Apparently Nigerians used to exchange greetings for at least two minutes about the weather and their families before getting to the point. Now they get straight to the point, and ask 'how's the family?' right at the end, hanging up before the other person has a chance to respond.

Would you give your boss your mobile number?

A Japanese university surveyed the new graduate employees about their communication style in 2005, having previously surveyed a similar group in 2000, and found that the percentage of employees who would give their private mobile phone number to their boss had risen from 53% to 75% over the five years.

The Nikkei Business journalist Kobashi Akihiko (subscription only) speculates as to why this might have happened and wonders if mobile phones have stopped being such a private, intimate communication mode and are now equivalent to a fixed line in the household. He also wonders if it is now becoming the case that it is offensive if a mobile phone rings in a meeting not because a private communication has intruded into a public space but because a public communication has intruded into a private space. He even wonders if the fixed direct line phone in the office might now be the phone number that is only given to intimate acquaintances.

Saudi bluetooth flirting

My business partner in Chicago sent me this article from the Chicago Tribune (pay to view unfortunately) about how Saudi men and women are flirting by using Bluetooth, in order to connect without flouting the Wahhabi Islamic regime they live under. Unrelated women and men caught talking risk being detained by the religious police. Connecting by Bluetooth means contact is not even going through the phone company, so is less traceable. There is little the government can do to control it - it even tried to ban camera equipped phones last year but backed off because cameras have become a feature in most phones.

Bluetooth flirting, which often includes exchanging images such as babies blowing kisses or animated belly dances, sentimental messages or romantic songs has replaced the previous way of flirting which was to toss phone numbers at women through car windows or in shopping malls.

Americans play to win shocker

According to a survey by an independent research agency, SKOPOS, there are distinct differences between Americans and 'Europeans' (interesting that there must have been enough similarities between Europeans compared to Americans that they could lump Europeans together) with regard to mobile gaming.

Americans tend to play mobile games for much longer periods than their European counterparts, with 33 percent admitting to playing a single mobile game for more than twenty minutes at a time, compared with just 21 percent of Europeans.

This high percentage is backed up by the fact that 45 percent of US gamers 'play to win' - returning to the same game in an effort to beat previous high scores and retain a competitive edge. Just 17 percent of Europeans admitted to playing the same game to beat high scores.

Iranian text messaging

I remember ten years ago being sandwiched between employees from Mitsubishi Corporation's Tehran and Baghdad offices, with staff from the Istanbul and Athens offices also on our table at a dinner for the Global Leadership Programme we were running and feeling worried that rows would break out. The charming and gentle man from the Tehran office reassured me that they all had more in common than they had differences, and said 'you know we like to have friends round for dinner where we drink wine, eat French food and our women wear Western clothing - just like in Europe - so long as it is within the safety of our own houses.' And indeed we had a great time.

There's been plenty of coverage in blogs and official media of the use of text messaging in the Iranian elections. The Reuters article has the edge over AFP one I think, in terms of detail and colour. Obviously with less than 10% of the Iranian population owning a mobile phone, texting is being used among the affluent middle classes, of whom my former colleague was a representative. Anyway, it's a nice reminder, as Britain's funniest Iranian stand-up comedian and actor is good at pointing out to us Brits, that Iranians are by no means all humourless fundamentalists.

Mobile usage dictated by early adopters?

From an article in the Wall Street Journal, April 25th:

One reason U.S. cellphone habits are more utilitarian is that the gadgets caught on first with executives who needed to stay in touch. Some Americans turn on their cellphones only in emergencies. In the U.S., "the cellphone is an inferior version of what you already have at home and work," says anthropologist Mimi Ito, of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and Japan's Keio University.

It's impossible to predict exactly how cellphone culture will develop in the U.S. But in Asia, young people have been the drivers. Cellphones were adopted early on in Japan by girls living in cramped households, because they lacked other private communication, such as personal telephones and Internet access.

And I suppose in Europe we partly have the utilitarian business person but also the young early adopters, who took up text messaging.

The article is mainly about mobile advertising, and how it has been a big success in Asia because mobile phone habits have been influenced by youthful early adopters. The author says another advantage is that in Asia people don't mind thumb typing text messages but Americans cannot be persuaded to do so (yet?). Also that Japan led the phone text revolution because of the taboo on talking on phones. It seems that advertisers are not giving up on the US market however.

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.

Mobile communications and social capital

Very busy (hurrah!) at the moment so cannot give this line of research and thought the attention it deserves, but another useful article from Howard Rheingold on TheFeature, on mobile phones and social capital. Lots of stuff to go off and mine in the comments too.

This part

The problem, "in the broader scheme of things," might be the importance of the weaker and wider social ties Granovetter wrote about, which require connections between networks. While the personal and always-on nature of mobile media makes it easier for smaller groups to strengthen their social ties, that local strengthening comes at the cost of at energy and time that must be subtracted from more global weak-tie interactions.

absolutely chimes with what I have been saying since I researched this for my book on the history of Mitsubishi Corporation, which is that unfortunately, for all their global reach, information and telecommunication technologies can all too often strengthen smaller group ties at the expense of more global, diverse interactions. In the Japanese multinational corporation's case, direct dialling, e-mail, groupware, faxes etc enabled the HQ group to stay in touch, at the expense of them interacting with their local non-Japanese colleagues.

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.

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.

Samsung smack

This will certainly enable mobile phones to become a more 'high context' medium for communication...

Robust cultures

Two articles from TheFeature which I think complement each other. One from Douglas Rushkoff repeats the commonplace fear that global business is responsible for killing minority language and cultures because it ignores them, whilst the other from Howard Rheingold looks at the innovative ways that people in Kenya, Peru and India are using wireless technologies. Minority cultures and languages will not die because of global business producing products and services that ignore them, people will find their own ways to use technologies that support what they want to do.

Motoman project in Cambodia using motorbikes to retrieve and send e-mails in remote areas.

Leaving it on while getting it on

I guess this survey result means Germans are rather more, erm, polychronic than I thought.

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.

It's only me

Techdirt Wireless reports on the Japanese government considering outlawing pre-paid phones in Japan due to them being used for fraud. Their story comes from Gerhard Fasol's blog. He points out (as have I in the past) that this is not such a big deal in Japan, as prepaid services have not been that popular. He also mentions the "ore ore" fraud as being an example of the kind of scams people have used prepaid mobiles for, which is worth explaining in more detail.

Japanese people rarely use first names when they talk to each other. When they are talking to someone with whom they are on intimate terms (relatives, boyfriends/girlfriends) etc they will say 'anata' (if female) or 'kimi' (if male) meaning 'you' when calling out for them - for example if they are in different rooms in the house. They would refer to themselves as 'watashi' (if female) or 'ore' if male when making it clear who they are - for example on the phone or when they've just come home. Like 'it's me!' in English (or 'it's only me' which always sets my teeth on edge slightly as it seems so unnecessarily self effacing).

So what the scammers have been doing is ringing random people from their prepaid phones and saying 'it's me' and then explaining they need money quickly for some emergency. When the victim realises it's a scam and tries to trace the call, they can't - I presume because the pre-paid number has by then been ditched or records aren't kept of who the subscriber is. This does of course raise the question of why the victim can't tell by the voice, intonation, expressions etc whether it really is their son. Are relations between mothers and sons in Japan really that bad? Or - more likely - that a mobile phone is used rather than a landline because the quality of the voice will be more distorted and muffled and easier to disguise? More explanations of the scam here and here.

Manga showing an Ore Ore fraudster at work - from a landline - but wearing a muffling mask - thanks to Nigiri Kopushi (not his real name I suspect).

Grrr (we have nothing to learn from Japan part 231432)

"We want to stop our customers doing what they want to do." Get real.

Update:Oh, right... I'm sort of sorry. Still don't see why 3 can't let people have unlimited access to the web with their mobiles even if the quality is bad...

I see what you mean

Interesting discussion on The Feature with Professor Kristof Nyiri, director of the Institute of Philosophical Research, part of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, about visual communication using mobile phones.

"I bet most of the people that you have texted or called today are actually people you will meet face-to-face at some point today. From my research, many mobile calls are to people who are physically close, and many texts are to people you are about to meet."

Seems true from my experience - and e-mails tend to be to people I am not going to meet immediately. I also liked the quote he used from Professor Robin Dunbar of the Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioural Ecology Research Group at the University of Liverpool, that "gossiping is the essence of language". Gossip is of course very high context communication, as you need to know about the background and stories surrounding the people involved in order to understand what is being said. So texting gossip shows low context technology can be used to communicate in a high context way.

And his comment re cultural barriers to using MMS:

"TheFeature: To what do you attribute the relatively slow uptake of MMS? Nyiri: Cost and ease of use play parts, but the key barrier is cultural. People are increasingly taught verbally and, at school, are discouraged to think in terms of images. We did some research with different users who were given MMS devices. The three groups were carpenters, soft drinks salespeople and estate agents. By far the biggest users were the carpenters because they were used to thinking in terms of drawings and images."

Whereas Japanese and Chinese language is still very visual in its written form, with pictograms representing actual things, so that is why Japanese frequently use emoticons and MMS...?

Toxic mobile conversations

Normally I find articles about people finding mobile phones annoying a bit ho-hum and predictable, but using this recent survey of Americans' attitudes to overhearing mobile phone conversations as an excuse, I cannot resist describing my train journey home last night, where the effect of overhearing one man's mobile phone conversations was the most toxic I have witnessed yet.

He was on the phone before we even left the station, and had a penetrating voice that carried through the noise of the train in motion. Phrases that bored into my brain included 'I'm into buying property now. So if you know anyone with a flat or small house, not already on the market, let me know...', 'I've got to make an important call in five minutes, so I can't talk for long...'
At this point a very grumpy looking lecturer type who was trying to annotate an article got up from the seat opposite Toxic and moved further down the carriage.

Toxic continued 'I've thought about it and you've got to buy (inaudible).... You should buy Rich Dad Poor Dad. If you don't like it or don't read it, I'll buy it back from you at the price you paid for it......no I don't know how long it is, I didn't count the pages...... A day and a half. Normally it takes me a year to read a book........"

At this point a man reading Tom Clancy opposite me caught my eye and started rolling his eyes and grimacing, finally getting up and moving into the next carriage.

Toxic continued. 'It was my birthday on Sunday. Yeh, 39. I'm officially an old bastard. A dirty old bastard heh heh heh.'

I then realised I had read the same page of my book four times and it still wasn't registering. So I got up and moved, at which point another man behind Toxic said to me as I passed him 'I've just come back from living in Brussels. And the first thing I get is this!" pointing at Toxic's back. 'Yes, sorry' I said. 'Maybe some people really do deserve to die a slow and painful death.'

Showoff, voice like nails on a blackboard - had a nice blue linen shirt on though.

Nubile, mobile and criminal

Following on from yesterday's posting on teenage use of mobile phones because they derive their identities from being part of a group, it turns out that criminal teens are even more avid mobile phone users than average teenagers - in Japan. Needing to keep the gang up-to-date on criminal plans?

And in Norway those teens who use their mobile phones the most lose their virginity the earliest and have sex more frequently than teenagers who use their phones less.

And American teens still prefer instant messaging to SMS - from their PCs at home. Another indicator of a major cause of obesity across the pond I would say. At least European teens are out and about (or having sex) while they text, thus burning off calories.

(Thanks to Techdirt)

I network therefore I am

An interesting discussion following an article by Douglas Rushkoff on The Feature, as to whether communication technologies are making people less 'individual' in the Western, Renaissance sense and more defined by who they network with. One comment points out that this would explain the high adoption rates of mobile phones and data services in societies where the group is more important than the individual. It would also explain why teenagers and people in their twenties (East or West) are such avid mobile phone users - they are still defining themselves by their group of friends - a group which is still quite fluid and therefore high maintenance.

Mobile tour guides

I expect New York isn't the only place to be introducing something like this - a service that gives you aural tours of the streets delivered to your handset once you key in your destination via a text message. The BBC has done something similar to accompany Peter Ackroyd's wonderful London series on TV.

I could have done with an Amsterdam version when I had a few hours to kill there last week before getting my plane. Not that sitting outside a bar by a canal drinking a beer was such a bad way to pass the time...

Europeans don't...

There's been a couple of surveys saying European mobile subscribers are not using Java or Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS).

As Tom Hume says, you could actually flip the statistics on the MMS one and instead say "look how often Europeans are sending MMS, considering how new the technology is". Also, anecdotally but also based on how the sector evolved in Japan, people tend to take photos of friends, children etc when they first get a cameraphone. These are the kinds of photos that you want to share with people, but you also want their face to face reaction. My anecdotal evidence - when I went to pick up our son from nursery recently, one of the staff showed me a photo she had taken of him with her mobile - it was a great photo and she obviously wanted to see my proud face when she showed it to me, rather than send it to my mobile. Also, a friend of mine has just been to stay the weekend, and she showed me various photos of prospective and current boyfriends, whilst I showed her photos of our son, both on our mobiles, after lots of wine - a highly sociable and intimate bit of communication that is best done face to face.

As for Java, I think that as soon as operators and developers stop seeing Java only as a way of delivering sophisticated (and high cost) games to mobiles, and start incorporating it into screensavers, ringtones, calendars, lotteries, horoscopes etc delivered to mobiles, then we will see the kind of Java usage in Europe that you see in Japan and South Korea.

Wireless Watch Japan

Daniel Scuka of Wireless Watch Japan has done an excellent report on the latest wireless developments in Japan, following his recent trip there. As Daniel used to live in Japan and knows all the key companies, what he says is far more in-depth and hands-on then most reports out there about Japan.

Points that stood out for me:
1) People are paying for and companies are making big money out of chaku-uta - the next generation of ringtones which are of CD quality, from the original music, so more royalties to the master right holders (the record companies). Which shows how recent surveys showing that people are not willing to pay for mobile music are misleading.
2) Mobile e-mail (not SMS) is still the killer app - especially popular is the ability to put emoji (emoticons) into e-mails. I'm not sure whether this feature is one that will be so popular in Europe, as this is a cultural difference to do with wanting to express feelings non-verbally.
3) Cameraphones being used in creative ways that have nothing to do with European operator defined ideas of MMS etc. One man who was a ramen noodle fanatic takes photos of every bowl of noodles he has. OK this might be to do with Japanese tendencies towards being 'otaku' (obsessive) about particular things, but in Europe we have our anoraks, geeks and nerds too. It's true that in Japan being 'otaku' about food is pretty widespread. I intend to post an entry soon about Japanese food blogs.

China - mobile phones and religion

Dr Genevieve Bell seems to have one of those jobs I didn't realise people could get paid to do other than in academia - travelling round the world watching people using technology with an Intel salary. She's quoted in a BBC News online article about Chinese people using their mobile phones to access the lunar almanac - something I'm sure Japanese mobile content providers can supply too. She says that Asian cultures are 're-imaging' the role of the mobile phone - which rather assumes that the role of the mobile phone has been defined by Western cultures first.

I would look at it more by starting with the role of religion in daily life, particularly the kind of religious practices that are based on lunar almanacs or finding the right direction for Mecca. Mobile phones are part of everyday life both in the West and in Asia, but in Asian cultures, religion is not something separate from daily life, to be practiced in a church on Sundays only - even without being 'religious' as such, a Chinese or Japanese person would want to know whether a day was auspicious or not, before starting a new venture, and would consult their mobile phone if such a service was available, rather as anyone might use their mobile to find out the weather forecast.

18th century Japanese almanac

Japanese blogs

I have been lazy about reading Japanese blogs in Japanese. I read Gen Kanai's and Joi Itoh's blogs, which are written in English and mostly link to English language material. I also read blogs written in English by expats in Japan such as the beautiful looking and award-winning Antipixel, Mediatinker and Cerebral Soup.

And now there seems to be some controversy over an article on The Feature which talks about the low uptake of moblogging even in Japan. I've said before that we Anglophones should be very careful about inventing a term, defining it and then assuming that it is the universal term and definition, allowing us to judge whether non-Anglophone cultures 'do it' or are any good at it.

This point came up again at The Royal Institute of International Affairs Japan Group meeting yesterday in London, where someone pointed to a recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit, which ranked the UK second in terms of 'e-readiness' and Japan 25th. 'E-readiness' is, according to the EIU, "a collection of factors that indicate how amenable a market is to Internet-based opportunities." As far as I can work out, Japan is placed rather low despite high uptakes of 3G, broadband, local loop unbundling etc - because it scored badly on 'consumer and business adoption' (presumably the low penetration rate of PCs - but what about the fact that people can and do access e-mail, the Web and do e-commerce from their mobile phones?) and 'supporting e-services' (meaning consulting and IT services). Well I guess this criterion has been included because the survey is sponsored by IBM, who want to drop a big hint at Japanese companies and the Japanese government who have traditionally preferred to do things in-house, rather employ consultants...

There is no doubt that a lot of Japanese people are blogging, and have been doing something like blogging from their mobile phones since 1999, when i-mode was launched. It may be that 'moblog' software as has been developed in the US and Europe does not exist in the same way, but being a very visual culture, Japanese bloggers have found ways to incorporate all kinds of images, some from cameraphones, into their websites. For example, this site, Magic Island, hosts over 3 million 'home pages', attracting 900 million page views a month, largely created and viewed via mobile phones.

So over the next few days I will introduce some Japanese blogs, written in Japanese, by Japanese people, that I have randomly picked up and started reading on a regular basis. I'll translate some of their self description and any entry that catches my eye. Here's the first:

a wild flower. "I am a working woman. A mother. One strike against me [Japanese expression for having one failed marriage]. A woman. As such, here are my various feelings... Being a woman is fun..."
Entry for April 27 "I walked home with my son in a pitch black street. Holding hands. His small round hand was warm. 'A shooting star!' he called out, but Mama didn't see it. 'If you see a shooting star you can make a wish.' 'I didn't know that, so I didn't make a wish.' 'Yes, well...' 'If there hadn't been traffic lights and buildings and cars I could have run and caught it.' He's so sweet! [Japanese emoticon for parent silly with pride which I can't reproduce in MovableType grrr] I hope he can somehow put off becoming a difficult adolescent."
Other postings are on the subject of makeup, the Pill, tomatoes, buying male underwear, semi-naked mannequins and Lush (the UK soap shop now in Japan).

I suppose some might find this saccharine and insubstantial. I rather like it.

Emotional attachment to a laptop

Apparently Europeans and Asians feel emotional attachment to their mobiles, but Americans feel an emotional attachment to their laptops.

I mostly felt antipathy towards my laptop - I never seemed to get it to work in any of the ways I wanted to, as it was configured by my then employer's IT department to be nothing more than a mobile slide carousel. Also I never really bought into the idea that it was portable - especially after packing all the other bits and pieces needed to make it work. Maybe whether you travel everywhere by car or use public transport is a factor in explaining differing popularities of laptops. In Tokyo you definitely want to keep what you carry to a minimum.

Saudis and their mobile phones

Jeff Jarvis has found a Saudi blogger, and seems to be implying it's the first (I bet it isn't - or maybe it's the first written in English, on a 'recognised' Western blog host) but anyway, as he says, it may be "the first crack in the wall".

There's a great post on it about how much Saudis love their mobile phones. Apparently camera phones are banned but are openly on sale. This story was particularly funny:

A Saudi was giving a presentation at my place of employment. Screen, PC projector, Powerpoint, the whole thing. Then his phone rang. He didn't switch it off, he answered it. Just as well, it was his Mother! We sat listening for 5 minutes while he explained why he'd not been to see her for two days. I have to say, some of his excuses were ingenious, I'll use them myself sometime. Finally he resumed his presentation, without an apology.

It's often said in intercultural research and texts that people from Arab cultures will answer their phone whilst having a meeting because they are polychronous in their attitudes to time - nice to have a bang up to date example to cite next time I need to explain the difference between monochronous and polychronous.

Too complicated for Americans?

Tom Hume says it all really about an article in The Inquirer, in which the reporter claims that cellphone companies in the US are making their handsets too complicated. I'm sure American users will eventually find uses for their multi function phones, as the Japanese did and the Europeans are beginning to.

Ear benders

I couldn't remember in a previous posting where I had seen a study on why overheard conversations on mobile phones are more annoying and intrusive than overhead conversations between two people nearby.

The survey I was thinking of isn't this one - picked up by Jakob Nielsen - "Why are Mobile Phones Annoying?" Behaviour and Information Technology, vol. 23, no. 1, 2004, pp. 33-41, by Andrew Monk, Jenni Carroll, Sarah Parker, and Mark Blythe from York University. But it proves that mobile phones are more annoying than overheard face to face conversations (although not much more annoying than loud overheard face to face conversations) and suggests that this might be due to the fact that we cannot help paying more attention to a conversation when we can only hear half of it.

The comments on Jakob Nielsen's posting are interesting too - particularly:

Joseph Thoennes writes:
The conclusion of mobile phone conversations being annoying because you can only hear half the conversation is probably correct. A similar situation arises when two people are speaking together in a language that the listeners do not understand. I've experienced this effect when traveling.
Another similar experience is when you hear music but can't place it. Once you place it, you forget it.
I think it has something to do with the pattern matching portion of the brain. Not being able to match a pattern seems to produce a vague stress le