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No remote working for Koreans and Japanese

An article in Business Week points out how very few Japanese and Koreans have company laptops or are able to use them to work from home, in contrast to other countries such as the US and UK.

The premium placed on face time in the office (apart from sales people, who are expected to be out of the office during working hours, I would add) means that workers worry that leaving before the boss, even if they are going to work from home makes them look like slackers. Trust is dependent on people sitting close by each other, able to see and hear what the other is doing.

As a result, there is little in place to control, measure and check people who do try to use laptops or work from home. Hence what appears to have been the leaping to assumptions and wrongful accusation of a Chinese engineer at a Japanese car parts company.

More on minihompies

I mentioned the success of South Korean 'minihompies' (miniature home pages) before. Now CNN's Working Tech has written up about them, with this to say about the cultural aspects of whether such a service will be popular in the US.

"To be sure, there is much about South Korean culture that doesn't translate well. The country's love of cuteness is a little too saccharine for American tastes.

And part of Cyworld's success can be chalked up to users' incessant message-swapping - not answering a missive from a friend with all due speed is considered a faux-pas in Korean society.

There is a chance that the rise of broadband and the rise of online gaming will not be so interlinked on this side of the Pacific (though the runaway success of World of Warcraft suggests otherwise). There's a chance that US social networkers may prefer a stripped-down service with no avatars, bells or whistles.

But don't forget that US wireless operators used to dismiss Japanese advances in mobile phones in much the same way. Do users really want to send text messages, watch video on their phones, or buy ringtones, they mused, or is that something peculiar to Japan? Well, as it turned out, they do, and companies that bet early on the notion that technology can cross cultural boundaries, like Sprint Nextel (Research) and Cingular, won out."

Well, I've been saying this for a long time, and even tried (perhaps not very persistently) to get a company going that would provide mobile minihompy type services for the UK. But I gave up, and I'm still not sure the time is right or the operators have the right strategy yet for it to succeed in the UK, despite the success of Myspace.

Korean minihompy

South Korean company Cyworld claim that 90% of South Korean 24 to 29 year olds (a quarter of the total population) have a minihompy (miniature homepage) on Cyworld. One feature that makes it a bit different from blogs and other home page services is the 'miniroom', that users construct. At the bottom of the Cyworld website there are links to Taiwanese and Chinese versions, but the Japanese version link is not live, for some reason.

Hat tip to Doors of Perception.

South Korean 'cyberterror'

It turns out the whole saga of dog-sh**t-girl in South Korea was just the tip of the, um, iceberg and the South Korean media have been working themselves up into quite a state about 'cyberterror' - where netizens gang up to bombard a website they don't like or to express an opinion. The South Korean government is as a result looking into whether to insist that people give their real names online (apparently some sites already ask users to input their citizenship numbers).

It's quite amusing how the dog-sh**t-girl saga made its way around the net and round the world, into the Washington Post and then back onto the Korean language internet again and now it's been taken up in the Nikkei Express (electronic newsletter from Nikkei Business, Japan's leading business magazine) by a professor from a Korean women's university. She explains the whole story, and other cyberterror incidents but takes a different tack from the government, saying that most Koreans are quite happy to post on blogs revealing their real names, but now some are saying that this leads to too much invasion of privacy, and apparently have started a 'Victims of Portal Sites' group.

I sense a clash between traditional, authoritarian segments of Korean society, who believe people should be made to clear up their dog's mess and that the government should take the lead in enforcing socially acceptable behaviour, no matter what the threat to privacy, and the blogging generation, who are still trying to understand the implications of being one of the most 'wired' societies in the world.

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.

E-mails are, like, so not cool

According to a Chungbuk University survey of over 2000 high school and college students, young South Koreans rarely use e-mail any more, preferring SMS and instant messaging. I wonder if this will continue when they start working. I've already had people asking me whether instant messaging is generally acceptable in Japanese corporates and my quick scan of news articles suggested it was still confined to young people and seen as being for private not corporate use.

Also interesting to note from this article that mini-homepages are big in South Korea as well as Japan. I have been trying to explain the concept of Japanese mini homepage sites such as Mahou no Island (Magic Island) to people in the UK, who immediately lumped them in with moblogs, which I never felt was quite the right description. They are much richer than just a diary with cameraphone pictures attached.

Thanks to Textually and Techdirt.

OhmyNews

South Korea's 'citizen reporters' website OhmyNews featured in a generous sized article in Saturday's Financial Times. Subscription only I'm afraid, but I still subscribe to the hard copy because of articles such as this - international, serious, interesting and no axe to grind.

Anyway, it seems there are South Korea-specific factors behind OhmyNews' success (35,000 citizen reporters, 40 staff reporters, 14 million page views a day in 2003, a modest profit based on advertising revenues topped up by third party content sales and a tipping service). Apparently there has been a real hunger for anti-establishment or at least 'non' establishment news due to the dominance of conservative newspapers. South Koreans have been able to fulfil this hunger by reading OhmyNews thanks to a high penetration of broadband access at home. The FT reporter quotes Professor Yoon of Yonsei University who even thinks that OhmyNews helped Roh win the last presidential election.

The FT article says that JanJan which was set up in Japan specifically to imitate OhmyNews (and features some Japanese translations of OhmyNews stories on its website) has not been so successful. This article in the Japan Media Review points to some of the reasons. Firstly, Japanese use of PC and internet access from home is much lower than in South Korea. Which is true, but as many of the target audience in Japan use their mobile phone to access the internet, I'm surprised I don't see any evidence of a mobile phone version on the JanJan site.

Secondly, as Miki Imazu, a Tokyo-based consultant who has conducted market research in South Korea says in the article, "Koreans love to express their opinions. Koreans always want to talk about whatever is going on in the world. It's almost as though Korea is a culture where every citizen wants to be a politician. It's a national character trait -- and the polar opposite of the Japanese personality."

OhmyNews founder Oh Yeon-ho and staff

Cell image

An article on August 3rd in the Financial Time's Creative Business supplement (subscription required), entitled 'Closing the Culture Gap', says that Samsung Electronic's European design centre's Masterpiece project, of four mobile handsets to replicate European concepts of high status premium products, failed to win over top management, because there is a less well developed market for premium products in Korea "and nowhere near the same sense that a phone can become integral to an individual's self-image and self-esteem."

As the person saying this is Harry Choi, who manages the European centre and who is presumably Korean, I hesitate to disagree, but it seems to me that Koreans also have a sense that their phone is integral to their self-image and self-esteem, but have a different aesthetic and design sense of what a phone that complements their self image should look like.

Take the jewel-encrusted Samsung T500, which was clearly designed to fit the desired self-image of a certain type of woman, but probably not a Western European woman. (It seems to feature mostly on Russian mobile phone sites now...). Apparently the British designers at the Samsung Electronic European design centre came up with a model for women modelled in a cool, heavy ceramic material - no doubt very minimalist and chic to a Western European eye, but possibly looking rather dull to Korean eyes. Another model was cased in wood, titanium and silver plate, to appeal to Jaguar car owners.

Having gone so far as to set up a European design centre in order to understand cultural differences, it does seem odd that 70% of their designs never reach the consumer. Failure of nerve by top management? Or is this the norm for design centres? Or were their designs not very good or not deemed commercially viable?

The Samsung T500