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58 Brieng Mobile-phone culture The Economist January 2nd 2010
2 Elsewhere the physical environment
determines which kinds of handsets prevail,
says Younghee Jung, a design expert at
Nokia, the world’s largest maker of handsets.
In hot India, for instance, men rarely
wear jackets, but their shirts have pockets
to hold phoneswhich therefore cannot
be large. Indian women keep phones in
colourful pouches, less as a fashion statement
than as a way to protect the devices
and preserve their resale value. It also
makes for a noteworthy contrast with Japan,
says Ms Jung. If women there keep
phones in a pouch and decorate them with
stickers and straps, that has nothing to do
with economics, but reects the urge to
personalise the handset. Phones are highly
subsidised in Japan and the resale value is
essentially nil, so it is not unusual to see
lost units lying in the gutter.
In some countries it is a common habit
to carry around more than one phone. Japanese
workers often have two: a private
one and a work one (which they often turn
o so bosses cannot get them at any hour).
I have one phone for work, one for family,
one for pleasure and one for the car, says a
Middle Eastern salesman quoted in a
study for Motorola, a handset-maker. Having
several phones is often meant to signal
importance. Latin American managers, for
instance, like to show how well connected
they are: some even have a dedicated one
for the boss.
As this example suggests, softer factors
may inuence the choice and design of
hardware, even for networks. If coverage
in America tends to be patchy, it is not least
because consumers seem willing to endure
a lot and changing operators is a hassle.
Elsewhere the reverse is true. Italians
demand good reception on the ski slopes,
the Greeks on their many islands and
Finns in road tunnels, however remote. If
coverage is poor, subscribers will switch.
Paradoxically, however, it is in Italy and
Greece that people are especially worried
about the supposed health risks of electromagnetic
elds. A 2007 survey commissioned
by the European Commission
found that 86% of Greeks and 69% of Italians
were very or fairly concerned
about them, compared with 51% in Britain,
35% in Germany and only 27% in Sweden.
It may be that people fret when they lack
reliable informationor that in some
countries local politicians stir up fears.
Whatever the reasons, the public reaction
explains why phone masts in Italy are
often disguised, for instance as the arches
of a hamburger restaurant, as a palm tree
or even as the cross on a famous cathedral.
In Moldova, by contrast, such masts are
monuments to prosperity. Every time we
put up a mast, they had a party. It connected
them, says Orange’s Mr Swantee.
Yet digital technologies change quickly,
and so do attitudes towards them. Will
such dierences between cultures persist
and grow larger, or will they diminish over
time? Companies would like to know, because
it costs more to provide dierent
handsets and services in dierent parts of
the world than it would do to oer the
same things everywhere.
Enter the Apparatgeist
A few years ago such questions provoked
academic controversy. Not everybody
agrees with Ms Ito’s argument that technology
is always socially constructed.
James Katz, a professor of communication
at Rutgers University in New Jersey, argues
that there is an Apparatgeist (German for
spirit of the machine). For personal communication
technologies, he argues, people
react in pretty much the same way, a
few national variations notwithstanding.
Regardless of culture, he suggests, when
people interact with personal communication
technologies, they tend to standardise
infrastructure and gravitate towards consistent
tastes and universal features.
Recent developments seem to support
him. When Ms Lasén went back to London,
Paris and Madrid a few years later,
phone behaviour had, by and large, become
the same in the dierent cities (although
Spaniards still rejected voicemail).
Yet it is not just the Apparatgeist that explains
this, argues Ms Lasén. In all three cities,
she says, people lead increasingly complex
lives and need their mobiles to
manage them. Ms Ito agrees. American
teenagers now also text madly, in part because
their lives are becoming almost as
regulated as those of the Japanese.
This convergence is likely to continue,
not least because it is in the interest of the
industry’s heavyweights. Handsets increasingly
come with all kinds of sensors.
Nokia’s Ms Jung, for instance, is working
on a project to develop an Esperanto of
gestures to control such environmentally
aware devices. Her team is trying to nd an
internationally acceptable gesture to quieten
a ringing phone. This is tricky: giving the
device the evil eye or shushing it, for instance,
will not work. Treating objects as
living things might work in East Asia,
where almost everything has a soul, but
not in the Middle East, where religious tenets
make this unacceptable.
In the long run most national dierences
will disappear, predicts Scott Campbell
of the University of Michigan, author
of several papers on mobile-phone usage.
But he expects some persistence of variations
that go back to economics. In poorer
countries subscribers will handle their
mobile phones dierently simply because
they lack money. Nearly all airtime in Africa
is pre-paid. Practices such as beeping
are likely to continue for quite a while:
when callers lack credit, they hang up after
just one ring, a signal that they want to be
called back.
A few dierences may remain within
borders, suggests Kathryn Archibald, who
works at Nokia and tries to understand
consumers in dierent parts of the world.
Only a few countries, mainly in Africa and
Asia, still need special cultural attention
when designing a phone (which is why
some models in India double as torches).
We see more dierences within countries
than between them, she says.
Nokia breaks down phone users into
various categories, rather than by geography.
Simplicity seekers barely know
how to turn on their phones and use them
only in case of trouble. At the other end of
the spectrum, technology leaders always
want the latest devices and feel crippled
without their phones. Life jugglers
need their handsets to co-ordinate the
many parts of their lives. Ms Archibald
says Nokia’s aim is to oer the right handset
to each such group.
But when it comes to contentthe services
oered via the phones and the applications
installed on themNokia pays considerable
attention to local culture. In India
and other developing countries the rm
has launched a set of services called Life
Tools, which ranges from agricultural information
for farmers to educational services
such as language tuition. In many
rich countries, by contrast, handsets come
bundled with a subscription to download
music. We need to operate globally, but be
relevant locally, concludes Ms Archibald.
All this raises a question: as dierences
fade, are people becoming slaves to the
Apparatgeist? Because of our evolutionary
heritage, we want to be in perpetual
contact with others, argues Mr Katz. Just
as technology allows people to overeat, it
now lets them overcommunicate. If this is
a problem now, imagine what would happen
if telepathy become possible. The
thought is not entirely far-fetched: researchers
at Intel, a chipmaker, are devising
ways to use brain waves to control
computers. A phone that can be implanted
in your head may be just a few years
awayat which point the Germans will no
longer be able to call it a Handy. 7