hightext

Time and IT

An amusing article from the San Jose Mercury on a survey which shows how electronic communication is making us all polychronic. Even the boss of the company who conducted the survey interrupted his own meeting with the journalist to answer a call from his mother. Reminds me of a previous posting of mine.

Hat tip to Techdirt News.

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.

Chinese parents and computers

Anthroplogists are helping companies such as Intel, Microsoft and Xerox to question their culturally specific approaches to various markets, according to an article in the Financial Times recently (subscription only).

For example , Chinese parents do not see computers as having the desired educational benefit of helping their children to learn Mandarin, and instead see PCs as a distraction because of uncontrollable access to the internet. This contrasts with American parents who think that buying a computer for your child early on is helpful to their education.

As a result of this research Intel launched a PC aimed at the Chinese home education market which has a touch sensitive screen that allows users to write in Mandarin, and even checks the stroke order that the character is being written in. Also, thanks to the anthropologist's analysis, Intel included a physical locking mechanism on the PC, visible from elsewhere in the room, as locks and keys have symbolism in China as manifestations of authority. The physical locking mechanism has more meaning than a software-based key.

Blogueurs

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.

*************
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

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.

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.

The one about the Brit and the Dane...

I always warn when doing cross cultural training for non-British people working with the British, about the British urge to tell jokes in the workplace. It seems we keep telling them even when we know they can backfire and the medium might be inappropriate (ie e-mail). Recently I was working with a Danish family moving to the US and they said Danes are just as bad too, in particular they have a penchant for telling jokes about sex in the workplace. They realise that they have to bite their tongues now they will be in Redmond Washington (no prizes for guessing which company they are working for).

Seasonally appropriate naughty British seaside postcard (which reminds me of Brighton, where we live)

What Good Are Notebooks?

Also only very tenuously something to do with information and communication technologies (hell, it's the holiday season, so why not - but see the end of this post), and only cross-cultural in the sense that he's American* and has actively sought out and promoted the music of other cultures, particularly Brazil - we went to see David Byrne last Saturday at the Brighton Dome. He is one of my all time musical heroes (narrowly pipped by David Bowie), so just seeing him was a treat in itself. However I would have to say I was a teeny bit disappointed. I think he and the band were tired and/or jetlagged. They had postponed the concert from April, so they could do it directly after WOMAD. But as they were touring extensively in Europe and the US before....

Also, although it was fun to see him work with strings and two percussionists, the end effect was a bit muddy, and many of the songs could have done with a crisp horn section or an additional attacking guitar. His encore playing of 'Heaven', with just an acoustic guitar made you realise how a lot of the material sounds better sparse than lush.

It was a bit odd sitting in my seat tapping my feet to the music (as the audience was on average even older than me, anything more might have been unseemly and embarrassing-parent-like), when one of the joys was to reappreciate what truly rocking and funky songs 'Once in a Lifetime' and 'Life During Wartime' are. I also realised how their lyrics have wormed their way into my subconscious - hence the title of this post. An unexpected treat was to get my favourite all time song Desert Island Discs final selection 'Naive Melody'. I am still deeply bored by 'Road to Nowhere' and have heard 'Psychokiller' too many times too. I wish he had played 'She Only Sleeps' from his new album, which apparently he has at other concerts.

The communication technology bit - David Byrne's current favourite website, to be viewed accompanied by 'Nothing But Flowers' - deadmalls.com

PS: I've also just discovered he has a tour journal.
And that he's married to the daughter of a Japanese mother and German father, which is pretty cross-cultural. *And that he was born in Scotland but brought up in Baltimore and has never taken US citizenship.

Cultures of music piracy

I hope the US and European record industry takes note of this important article,(link is to a pdf) by MIT Assistant Professor in Japanese Cultural Studies Ian Condry. He contrasts the two approaches of the record industries in the US and Japan, respectively the world's largest and second largest music markets, to file sharing and piracy.

Whereas the US (and by association European) record industry seems bent on prosecuting its own customers, presumably with the intent of somehow creating an atmosphere where young people will come to realise that file sharing is wrong, and will stop doing it, the Japanese record industry is seeking ways to rebuild customer loyalty rather than demanding customer obedience. As Condry says, imagine the following conversation:

Student A: "I got the new KRS-1 album. It's great.'
Student B: 'Cool. Could I borrow it some time? I'd like to hear it.'
Student A: 'No, I think we need to protect the copyrights of artists, record companies and publishers. Please go and buy the CD yourself.'
Student B: 'Loser.'

As he says 'music falls into that category of things that you are normally obligated to share with your dorm mates, family and friends.' I would have to agree, as a member of the (old crock) generation that was warned that 'home taping is killing music', and nonetheless lovingly crafted and was given lovingly crafted compilation tapes as tokens of friendship and more.

He points out that sales of CDs in both countries have been falling in the past few years but that in Japan this cannot be laid at the door of p2p networks, as Japanese people are not great users of p2p. A lack of broadband connectivity, a preference for connecting to the internet via mobile phone etc all play a part in this of course but (and this is where this article gets really ground breaking for us interculturalists) "the contrast is less one of 'Japanese culture' being different from 'American culture' but that American and Japanese fans share many attitudes, while the response of the Japanese business community differs markedly from those in the US." Japanese record companies recognise that CD rental shops are here to stay, so instead they try to analyse CD rentals to understand fans better.

In other words sometimes culture is "not necessarily guided by geographical area, but rather by the ways people are positioned in social, business and technological networks." This has been noted before of course - usually in relation to the way that the type of people that attend the kind of international business school I went to have more in common with each other than they have with more deprived social classes in their own countries.

Japanese music consumers are also copying and sharing music non-commercially, but they do it by renting CDs from rental stores for the equivalent of a couple of dollars, and then ripping them. Again, oldie that I am, I remember doing this in the 1980s when I lived in Japan (with records) - I even found a record rental shop that would actually tape the record for you until they got nervous and stopped doing it.

The reasons Japanese young people give for doing this are very similar to the reasons given by American 'pirates', namely that they feel the record companies are ripping them off (prices of CDs have increased by 7.2% 1999-2001 and are even more expensive in Japan), that too many bands are 'manufactured', and too many CDs have only one or two good tracks on them.

When asked under what circumstances they would pay for music, American students interviewed by Condry said they would pay for indie artists, or artists from their hometown or major groups with a solid track record of good albums, or genres of music that have stood the test of time and are not adequately supported by major record companies (jazz, classical). And of course there is the completist, fan instinct to own everything in tangible form produced by a particular artist (David Bowie and Talking Heads for me, Robyn Hitchcock for my husband). Japanese consumers have displayed similar preferences - Condry notes the way that Okinawan band Mongol 800 became a word-of-mouth success.

So Condry's recommendation to the music industry is to find new ways of connecting with and developing fans, if they want them to part with their money (non-stop touring is not recommended for health reasons ;-)) That it is all about the love, man. If music is just a commodity, consumers will get it as cheaply as they can. And that fans worldwide are ethical too - downloading is OK, but downloading and selling is not, even if these ethics are not fully consistent nor fully represent the music business.

(Thanks to Smartmobs who in turn got it from The MIT Technology Review)

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)

PowerPoint is evil - and funny

I've been doing a lot of work on intercultural presentation skills, and making a lot of PowerPoint slides recently, despite my better judgement. I came across this, which I realise has been linked to extensively already, but it does show how the plain but still beautifully constructed 267 words of the Gettysburg address (which I was using in a training session to illustrate American directness in speech), can be made turgid with PowerPoint. Actually I think Norvig missed a trick with "of/by/for the people". The slashes are hideous, but it could also have been an opportunity for a meaningless graphic with a blob for "the people" and various arrows shooting around - preferably phased per mouse click.

Here's a better use of PowerPoint, sort of, with Clinton's autobiography reduced from 957 pages to five slides by Daniel Radosh at Slate magazine. Clinton seems to have skipped the plain and direct aspects of American communication skills - not even enough 'show and tell' to titillate judging by the reviews.

British surfers confused or nosy?

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.

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.

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.

Paying for research

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.

Conference call hell

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.

Getting by, not getting on

I've finally read the whole of the latest UK think tank The Work Foundation's iSociety report, "Getting by, not getting on: Technology in UK workplaces". I can't say it told me anything I didn't already know, but it's good to have some impressions confirmed by research. (The report is 92 pages long and has to be printed at normal quality to be legible, using a lot of colour ink, so it may be worth spending the GBP10.00 to get a hard copy.)

There's no particular cross cultural angle to the report as it focuses more or less entirely on the UK. It does, however, examine why there were lower returns to investment in IT in the UK compared to the US in terms of productivity over the past few years, suggesting that is due to UK investment in IT having happened later than in the US, so the benefits have not been fully realised yet. It also talks about the network effect, that there are simply not enough uses for IT for companies in particular sectors (law was highlighted) for there to be an industry pressure to adopt and benefit from various IT tools.

These may be the main reasons, but I also wonder whether it isn't because US corporate cultures tend to be much more project focused ("Guided Missile" as Trompenaars/Hampden Turner put it) so employees will happily take up new IT if it helps get the job done. UK companies on the other hand fall into the "Incubator" type, where self fulfilment and respect from others are the motivating forces for the employees, so if IT tools seem to be undermining their job satisfaction and status, they are likely to resist.

Other points I highlighted were:

- a study of a Californian hi-tech research firm which showed that there were three broad emailing styles corresponding to different positions in the firm, even though very little formal hierarchy existed. Senior staff tended to send short, terse messages, often with poor spelling and grammar. This could be an indication of a busy and important job, but also a way of expressing it.
Lab workers mostly sent joke mails round friends. Middle managers tended to send long, jargon rich messages, often providing over-complex answers to simple questions. They were also most likely to use the 'cc' line. Ah, brings back memories!

- a lack of formal IT training in the companies studied, which meant that it was important to have informal learning available, from colleagues or in the case of the consulting company studied, from designated technology champions.

- how useless most companies are at implementing the change management that goes with introducing new technology. They tended to go for a top-down approach, with little consultation or understanding of the organisation and its various local components. And problems were most extreme when change was driven by IT executives or implemented solely by IT staff. Apparently IT recruitment consultants are therefore stressing the importance of IT staff being good communicators. Oxymoron?

- the report also suggests that outsourcing the IT function or having the IT function in a separate location breeds "ignorance and at worst, contempt" - both ways. (I take back that oxymoron comment then)

- finally the report summarises its findings in three myths - the myth of integration (that a vast range of the organisation's resources can be integrated using IT), the myth of control (that IT will allow managers easy control over staff) and the myth of solutions (the vendor claim that IT will provide a complete unifying solution to various management problems).

Blogs of War

When I posted about bloggers in Iraq using LiveJournal, I namechecked Rebelcoyote as one of the US soldiers in Iraq who had a LiveJournal blog. It turns out (thanks to Norman Geras) he's called Private First Class Trueman Muhrer-Irwin, and is now in hospital after a bomb went off under his transport, blowing off half his left foot, lodging some shrapnel in his eye and killing one of his colleagues.

The article also explains a question I had, about how far the US army allows its troops to blog:

"Soliders have the freedom of speech to express their own personal views. As long as it does not threaten anyone personally or denigrate the national chain of command, which is illegal, or claim to be from a standpoint of policy, that's fine," says Major Gary Tallman of the US Army Public Relations Office.

I wonder how many other countries' armies would allow such freedom of expression for their troops - I'm not making this point particularly to praise the US Army, just wondering if it's another cross-cultural difference. Specific differences that come to mind are, firstly, an American attitude that rules are rules, explicit and universally and rigorously applied, therefore soldiers will be well aware of them and will comply. Secondly, there also seems to be an American attitude to information that is quite different in higher context cultures, and is reinforced by the spread of internet access - that information is everywhere, so there is no point in worrying about shared organisational information becoming public. If you don't want it publicly known, don't share it within the organisation - viz Bush's Thanksgiving visit to Iraq. Higher context cultures are much more paranoid - they worry that the unspoken rules may not be observed, and that putting even benign, shared corporate information into explicit form may subject it to all kinds of misinterpretations.

Apparently some questioned whether his blog was a fake, or just part of US Army propaganda, but as you can see from my previous list, he was one of several US soldiers in Iraq blogging on LiveJournal. And I would imagine, if he was a US Army PR flack, he wouldn't have got blown up, or at least it would not have been admitted that he had.

Who's the most multicultural blog host of them all?

Continuing on from looking at The Mesopotamian blog, I saw a list of 9 other blogs written by Iraqis - they're all on Blogspot. Then I recollected that LiveJournal had a big list of where all their users came from, with links. Sure enough there are 260 LiveJournal users in Iraq.

Except there aren't. Yup, I was being naive and reckoning without the oh-so-ironic (in an Alanis Morissette sort of way) American teen who makes up the majority of LiveJournal users as far as I can tell. I clicked through 50 of the most recently updated and my rough estimate is that 80% are American teens living in Podunk, and the rest are US soldiers in Iraq, plus a few Americans who are out there on infrastructure building projects - oh, and two Russians for some unfathomable reason.

Actually it is quite interesting reading the US soldier blogs - with my HR/organisational change hat on I am trying and failing to imagine how their 'managers' maintain morale and purpose - maybe LiveJournal is a good place for them to vent though, and one shouldn't read too much into some of their down moments. You can find them by going to www.livejournal.com/users/ and then adding spastik-bob, givingintoashes, paladyn, rebelcoyote, mykmykmotorbyke, slownewsday, hawkinbagdad, themeshuggener, bumpthekoala, desertfox11m, combatpattybot.

So maybe LiveJournal isn't quite as multicultural as I had hoped. Another reason for choosing them now looking less attractive....

Attitudes to phones - cultural differences or market development stages?

AT Kearney very generously allow free downloads of their annual Mobinet study on international trends in mobile usage, done in conjunction with Cambridge University's business school, the Judge Institute of Managemement. This year's Mobinet 6 came out in June but has recently been picked up by a bored or desperate journalist as 'Breaking News' on RCR Wireless. Which in turn led to it being picked up by the always excellent TheFeature

The survey asks 5,600 mobile phone users in 15 countries about their attitudes towards mobile phones, and finds that Americans are concerned about privacy, security and complexity, Europeans about cost and technology and and the Japanese about keypad usability, content and speed of acccess.

So, is this a cultural difference or simply due to the differing stages of maturity of these markets?

Cross cultural studies (see Edward T. Hall and Mildred Reed Hall's 'Understanding Cultural Differences' for example) highlight the value that Americans place on personal privacy, but certain Europeans (the Germans for example) have been shown to have even stronger senses of privacy -"a culture in which it is a breach of privacy to open someone else's refrigerator". Perhaps what is more at stake for Americans is their belief in uninfringable rights.

Europeans are regarded as too diverse in cultural terms by intercultural theorists to be able to make any very sophisticated comment about the conclusion that Europeans are stingy and the survey doesn't explain what "being concerned about technology" means. It could be that Europeans are concerned about whether the technology actually works or that they are concerned that they won't know how to use it. The Japanese concern about keypad usability, content and speed of access yet again shows what demanding and meticulous customers they are.

We're all multitaskers now

I've often wondered if e-mail is making monochronic cultures more polychronic. People from monochronic cultures (USA, Switzerland, Germany and Scandinavia) see time in a linear way and like to focus on one job at a time in a highly concentrated way. Always-on e-mail is therefore anathema to this, as it interrupts their work with irrelevant demands. People from polychronic cultures (France, Latin America, Arab countries) presumably treat e-mail as just one of the many tasks they are juggling at once, not minding the distraction, happy to look at e-mails, talk on the phone and write a report all at once. Although I have Scandinavian roots I'm polychronic when it comes to work - I sometimes have so many windows open on my computer that I used to crash it (before I got XP!)

It seems that American business school students are becoming much more polychronic in the way they behave in the classroom, e-mailing and surfing the web while participating in discussions. Some faculty are happy with this, presumably if they feel comfortable that the e-mailing and surfing are all related to the topic in hand. But remembering the whispered comments that used to ripple across the room at my business school, I bet half the e-mails and surfing are tangential at best to the topic in hand... This article is mostly a plug for a book, but I like the anecdote about the author being surprised at the way his 10 year old daughter was able to incorporate instant messaging, watching TV and talking on the phone into getting her homework done. This shift in work habits has been going on for a while though - I remember my parents being totally unconvinced that I could do my homework and listen to music at the same time. Now I actually need music to work!