Digging into cultural wireless issues

From...

By Keith Shaw

(IDG) -- You'd think anthropologists would be more interested in how ancient cultures used stone cutting tools than why Swedish teen-agers are putting tattoos on wireless phones.

But a recent anthropologists' report published by Context-Based Research Group should be a must-read for wireless carriers and content providers trying to figure out how to popularize wireless data devices and applications.

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The study looked at wireless device usage among people in nine cities: Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Stockholm, Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The anthropologists' conclusions noted several cultural differences, including:

• In Stockholm, wireless phone devices become an extension of users' personalities, becoming "totems."
• In Paris, users are more concerned about how the phone looks than the underlying technology and what the phone can do.
• In London, shy users are adopting Short Message Service (SMS) and e-mail to overcome their shyness and reach out to others.
• Likewise, in Japan wireless usage helps citizens hurdle social barriers.
• In the U.S., there's fear about information overload created by being available 24-7.

But the study also discovered several similarities in worldwide wireless efforts, including:

• Carriers are not meeting expectations about the devices. For example, people in the U.S. clearly expected their experience to be much like the wired Internet and were disappointed with small screens, difficult text input and slow network connectivity.
• People consider their wireless devices to be companions, not "tools." A PC is a tool, a wireless device (specifically phones) is considered differently.
• Nobody's teaching anybody how to use these devices.

While the study is for wireless carriers and content providers, enterprise IT managers can also learn some lessons. As corporations extend applications to wireless devices, remembering what users want and how they interact with portable devices is key to making such efforts successful.

As Sean Carton, one of the authors of the study, says, "The greatest technology in the world is useless if nobody's using it."

Keith Shaw is Senior Reviews Editor at Network World Fusion.