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Technology

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The Necessity of a Smartphone

Photo by by iulian nistea

A New York Times article from last year looks at how the adoption of new technology, in particular smartphones, is as much about consumer sociology and psychology as it is about chips, bytes and bandwidth. Android commentators being the exception.

For a growing swath of the population, the social expectation is that one is nearly always connected and reachable almost instantly via e-mail. The smartphone, analysts say, is the instrument of that connectedness -- and thus worth the cost, both as a communications tool and as a status symbol.

The downside to this need for constant connection.

Such a digital connection can have its downside. The perils of obsessive smartphone use have been well documented, including distracted driving and the stress of multitasking. CrackBerry, a term coined years ago, is telling.

The smartphone, said Mr. Meyer, a cognitive psychologist, can be seen as a digital "Skinner box," a reference to the experiments of the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner in which rats were conditioned to press a lever repeatedly to get food pellets.

With the smartphone, he said, the stimuli are information feeds. "It can be powerfully reinforcing behavior," he said. "But the key is to make sure this technology helps you carry out the tasks of daily life instead of interfering with them. It's about balance and managing things."

Smartphone Rises Fast From Gadget to Necessity

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Bringing the News to India's Poor

Photo by rajkumar1220

A project called CGNet Swara is a fascinating glimpse of how mobile technology can provide news and information to people unlike anything they have ever had before.

The essence of his project is this: The Internet, cable television and newspapers reach only a fraction of the 80 million people in the rural tribal region of central India, but about half the population now has access to mobile phones, which cost the equivalent of only $15 or $20. These people, citizen journalists, supported by a small group of professional editors, can collect and deliver news through what amounts to a portal reachable by a phone number. It is, in effect, a voice version of news websites with a menu of stories available for listening.

It has now been about fifty years since the advent of transistor and battery-powered radios made an enormous impact on these rural areas. But the news on the radio stations is still very tightly managed by the state (there are no independent or private news stations). And, of course, the information only goes one way. That is what makes the mobile project so promising. For the first time, news can be made available from across the region in several languages, provided by reporters in towns and villages in a way that substantial parts of the community can engage.

"The real power of the mobile phone," wrote Sam duPont in a comment for NDN, a Washington think tank, "is in the fact that people around the world are adopting them of their own accord. . . . Mobile phones have leapfrogged not just land-line phones, but television, radio and nearly every other information and communications service and brings information into citizens' hands directly."

I've been fascinated lately by the possibilities of the iPhone as a media production tool but the change this brings pales in comparison to what last years mobile tech can bring to these people's future.

The Atlantic: Bringing News to India's Poorest People

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Flakjakt "Cascades"

Like we knew there would be there has been a flurry of footage released emphasizing the new media production capabilities of the iPhone 4. I think we are going to see all kinds of new art produced over extremely short time periods, shot and edited, on this tiny device. It's amazing.

Flakjakt "Cascades" claims to be the first music video shot with the iPhone 4. The device that captured it is what got my attention but the music and production are great in their own right.

Song was written in 2 days, video shot in 1.3 days and edited in 2 days.

In a fun weeklong experiment, my friend Marty and I collaborated on this video for an original song I wrote specifically for the iPhone 4 shoot. The overall goal was to produce a music video you can get down with - first and foremost - regardless of what camera we were shooting with. I think the end result turned out fantasmic! I hope you do to.

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Google's Mobile Behaviour Groups

Photo by Rain Chen

Google breaks down mobile device users into three behaviour groups: repetitive now, bored now, and urgent now.

I've widely seen this reported as distinct types of users which doesn't make sense, as many, depending on context, could fit into anyone of these groups during the course of a day.

The "repetitive now" user is someone checking for the same piece of information over and over again, like checking the same stock quotes or weather. Google uses cookies to help cater to mobile users who check and recheck the same data points.

The "bored now" are users who have time on their hands. People on trains or waiting in airports or sitting in cafes. Mobile users in this behavior group look a lot more like casual Web surfers, but mobile phones don't offer the robust user input of a desktop, so the applications have to be tailored.

The "urgent now" is a request to find something specific fast, like the location of a bakery or directions to the airport. Since a lot of these questions are location-aware, Google tries to build location into the mobile versions of these queries.

Via Informationweek.

See also: Lessons From Google Mobile and Gartner: Mobile User Experience to Drive Design of Web Apps.

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Why overheard mobile phone conversations are so irritating

Photo by SamPac

Researchers in the U.S. have offered an explanation as to why overheard cellphone conversations are so irritating, Reuters reported:

"We have less control to move away our attention from half a conversation (or halfalogue) than when listening to a dialogue," said Lauren Emberson, a co-author of the study that will be published in the journal Psychological Science.

"Since halfalogues really are more distracting and you can't tune them out, this could explain why people are irritated," she said in an interview.

"When you hear half of a conversation, you get less information and you can't predict as well," she said. "It requires more attention."

Thrown in the middle of the article are these nice statistics:

Last year Americans spent 2.3 trillion minutes chatting on cellphones, according to the U.S. wireless trade association CTIA -- a ninefold increase since 2000.

China has the most cellphone users with 634 million, followed by India with 545 million and the United States with 270 million, figures from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) show.

Annoyed by cellphones? Scientists explain why.

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Cell Phone Culture

We stand close together, but we are so far apart

The MIT Communications Forum serves as a site for cutting-edge discussion of the cultural, political, economic and technological impact of communications, with special emphasis on emerging technologies. In November of 2005, the Cell Phone Culture forum examined the cell phone as a technological object and as a cultural form whose uses and meaning are increasingly various, an artifact uniquely of our time that is enacting,"a ceaseless spectacle of transition."

This forum featured James Katz, professor of communication and director of Rutgers University's Center for Mobile Communications Studies, and Jing Wang, professor of Chinese cultural studies at MIT. Below are a few insightful excerpts for the edited summery of their talk:

The ubiquity of the cell phone has caused changes in certain cultural norms, as well. Businesses, movie theaters, parks and restaurants are just some of the spaces in which the appropriateness of cell phone conversations is disputed and unclear. The Metropolitan Museum of Art doesn't allow cell phones, but this doesn't always stop people from using them. (Katz shows a picture of a museum patron crouching to avoid being seen while using his cell phone.) Cell phones seem to prioritize communication with distant people over those sharing one's space, and the ethics of this new behavior are not universally agreed upon.

Cell phones are enabling people to create their own micro-cultures; they are changing cultural norms and values, and demonstrating consumers' ability to modify and repurpose technology for their own use. I believe that cell phones, by allowing people to insulate their private interactions from the culture around them, will encourage a kind of "walled garden" of micro-cultures that is complex, but exclusive. -- James Katz

Jing Wang gives her perspective from working on the Motorola account while at O'Gilvy. I assume the phone she is talking about is the failed ROKR.

We decided to prioritize youth culture in general over music, since music is not the primary driving force among young people in China.. There are four basic assumptions underlying traditional music marketing strategies. First, segmentation hinges on the basis of musical taste. Second, people specialize in terms of musical taste. Third, music is youth's main currency for self-expression. These assumptions have worked fairly well for transnational marketers, but so far they haven't in China. So my assignment was less about music than about the Chinese "linglei" youth.

In China, fashion, more than music, drives personal expression. Music is seen as a form of entertainment, not a form of self-expression. Not much yet about creating new art or new media. The kids we picked for this project don't have a lot of spending money, though the girl whose video diary you saw was able to convince her parents to buy her a new digital camera for this project. Other kids got less than $100 per month of spending money. Price is definitely a factor for any cell phone content. -- Jing Wang

MIT: Cell Phone Culture

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Mobile phones get us out in the real world

First Txt Of The Year

In this essay for Vodafone's now defunct receiver, Levinson argues that the mobile phone is a tool that can get us out in the real world. Which we can then ignore as we keep our eyes glued to our iPhones.

Media we can carry with us have always been an important part of our lives. The Kodak camera allowed everyone to become a photographer at the end of the 19th century. Car and transistor radios brought people out of their living rooms, and made rock'n'roll literally a music of the road and street. The venerable book is itself a revolution in mobility, in contrast to carvings on walls which could be brought nowhere. But the little mobile phone dwarfs all of these accomplishments, because it allows people to talk to other people, any place the caller and the called may be, and it allows access to the Internet and all it provides. A book carried anywhere allows access to that book; a mobile phone carried anywhere allows access to all the electronic books, newspapers, magazines, and other services of the Web.

In a sense, a mobile phone in hand makes the world around you intelligent, responsive. Prior to the mobile phone, if you had a question, if you wanted to talk to someone, you had to go to a special place - a telephone box, or a home, or an office, or a library - to receive a response. Most places in the world - the beach, the street, the train - were unable to provide that. As beautiful, alluring, important as they might be, most places in the world were deaf and dumb as far as providing the information and the conversation you needed.

But more recently Jan Chipchase argues there is a downside:

Ten years ago we made a conscious effort to connect. Today, if you're an urban dweller in a city like London, New York or like me, living here in Tokyo you probably make a conscious effort to disconnect. For many of you reading this fully disconnecting is no longer a viable option or at the very least a deeply discomforting one - so ingrained are communication technologies in our daily life.

What can you do when you do not want to be reached? The people who have your mobile phone number can be limited, but if even one person has your number, sooner or later there will be a specific occasion when you will not be in the mood for a conversation with that person. You can adopt means of evasion. You hear your mobile phone ring, but later claim that you did not hear it - that you were in a pocket in which service was patchy. You can say your mobile phone was accidentally off, when it was on. In addition to all of its benefits, the mobile phone may have ushered in the golden age of the little white lie.

Cellphone - the jangling saviour by Paul Levinson

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Mobile creation - the Japanese way

Mobile phone and the Japanese

Michael Keferl and Sven Kilian write in the now defunct (but still great) vodafone receiver magazine about the future of Japanese mobile culture and the here-and-now feeling of mobile-born, user generated content. It's a wonderful article with a ton choice tidbits.

From the article:

While we were tethered to our PC's to stay connected, in Japan many people had their first experiences on the web via mobile.

While the West rooted itself in the internet from the PC side, for most Japanese the mobile handset was the original gateway to the web, a mindset that generated the most unique, mobile-crazy culture in the world. Since voice functions are among the least utilized by the mobile generation, to call a mobile handset a 'phone' is a tremendous understatement. Most prefer to communicate through mobile email and make their first email addresses not with Yahoo or Gmail, but through their mobile carriers.

Japan, particularly in the big cities, is a place where daily downtime is a fact of life. Whether braving a long commute from the suburbs or simply waiting in line, downtime that was once exclusively filled by reading material or nothing at all, can easily be converted into productive communication and creation, through one tiny device.

Differences in authoring and sharing content via blogs.

The average blogger typically chooses (or is by default forced) to remain semi or completely anonymous, represented by a nickname and avatar of their choosing. For Mobage Town, Japan's largest mobile SNS, anonymity is part of the business model, as they derive most of their revenue from selling accessories for avatars. In general, blogs don't feature the author as the star in the way many American blogs do but are rather an insight into their world, with the camera as their eyes. Either way, in true Japanese style, some of the most popular personal Japanese blogs are written by celebrities documenting their own meals, pets and weekend trips.

On mobile novel subculture

Mobile novels aren't just about providing a new medium for writers but are also about capturing the writing style and culture of a generation fully fixed on their handsets. Years of writing mails to their friends has made the 'thumb generation' highly proficient with a keypad and the books are printed to look the same way on paper as they would on the screen, to maintain realism. The short sentences, slang and abbreviations may not lend themselves well to traditional literature but they very much reflect the real lives of the authors and their audiences.

Mobile creation - the Japanese way (2008)

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QR Code Sand Castle

Last summer communication "architects" Sinap Co. Ltd. launched the Sinap Summer 2009 Project to create a human-scale QR code out of sand on a Shonan beach outside of Tokyo. It is a novel and fun way of reaching customers in a world suffering from information overload. Fantastic.

Via Japan Trends.

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Marko Ahtisaari: Nokia's designs on Apple

As Nokia's senior vice president of design and user experience, Marko Ahtisaari is the man charged with leading the software and hardware designers who must craft the challenger to the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices that the Finns have so far lacked, reports the FT's tech blog.

"I still think the whole industry is missing a trick," said Mr Ahtisaari during a meet-the-press session in London yesterday. "All the touchscreen interfaces are very immersive. You have to put your head down. What Nokia is very good at is designing for mobile use: one-handed, in the pocket. Giving people the ability to have their head up again is critical to how we evolve user interfaces."

Given humanity's growing fixation with staring at glowing rectangles, any innovation that helps improve off-screen interaction really would be "social change", as Mr Ahtisaari puts it. Having to update Twitter, BlackBerry Messenger and Foursquare at all times can be quite a distraction from real-world conversation.

Nokia have an amazing track record for dreaming up wonderful concepts for interfaces and mobile devices which they never deliver. I love their ideas but I would love them more if I could actually use them.

Also, I find it ironic hearing a company like Nokia advocate less distraction from devices. I like hearing it but I'm not sure I believe it.

"Nokia is not about one lifestyle or one style," he said. "You are not buying into a story about how you have to live your life and what is good taste.... There will never be one single design language. It's much more democratic in that sense than many other brands."

So far, it seems smartphone buyers prefer Apple's benevolent dictatorship to Nokia's democracy. But in these tumultuous times for the Finns, Mr Ahtisaari will be leading the insurgency.

The Apple is closed or a 'dictatorship' meme is completely misguided and wrong. What Apple and other companies who value design and user experience have is more accurately called good design direction, which is akin to strong editorial and having a voice. Nokia's devices though robust on the low end, are a hodgepodge of features and design language. They are inconsistent, buggy and ultimately frustrating to use. People prefer Apple product for the very reason that they provide a far better user experience and Apple's ability to market this point. If Nokia can't concede this basic concept, that it's not about style but experience, how can they ever compete with the iPhone or Android?

Via putting people first.

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