“We Don’t Text”

May 23, 2007 at 12:56 pm · Filed under MMS, Mobile Tech, SMS

Every once in a while, friends will get married and will enter some form of technology blackout. The most common one that I see is for a couple to get married and drop their e-mail individuality. The order of the decline is as follows: (1) engagement; (2) purchase large, high maintenance dog; (3) wedding; (4) house purchase; and (5)  announce new, single e-mail account for couple/new family. It’s usually one of those carrier or cable MSO accounts, and you have no idea to whom you’re sending the e-mail.

Call it a pet peeve, but multiple e-mail accounts (usually 5) come with the basic residential Internet services, and it’s simply a matter of logging in and setting up another account. I’ve offered to help, but there’s usually some other reason for the single e-mail address, and it’s not technology that’s the limitation.

Another example where technology is not the limitation is text messaging. Mobile telephones can send and receive text messages, and it’s extremely cost effective as long as you keep the number of messages in the single- and double-digits.

A few days ago, I got a call from a family friend who was preparing to head on an overseas trip. He wanted to make certain that he knew how to make telephone calls from his mobile telephone while in a couple of GSM countries. We spoke about the “+” button on the phone and how it worked.

Then I suggested that he consider sending text messages instead of making telephone calls. At $2.50 a minute for voice calls, a text message (25¢ each) is a viable alternative. Especially when meeting up with friends, finalizing arrival information, and so forth.

But I wasn’t prepared for the response:

“We don’t text,” he said.

I didn’t have a response to that statement. It’s one thing to make a stubborn, blanket statement. It’s another thing to make that a family-wide admonition of a technology.

As a matter of course, I don’t like making such blanket statements, because few things are that black-and-white. For example, we don’t especially care for the “actor” Will Farrell, and we don’t go out of our way to see his films. But suppose that I’m watching cable television and Old School comes on. All other things being equal, I’ll probably watch it.

So I can’t categorically say that I will or will not use a particular technology, especially one that already exists on my mobile. Will I pay to send an MMS? Probably not. But I could envision a situation where I might want to send a photo to someone else. Would I pay at that time? Probably.

Later in the conversation, as we talked about the upcoming trip, I heard one more thing: “we don’t eat olives.” This time I had a response, “Have a good time in Italy!”

Comments

An Adult Take on Technology

May 18, 2007 at 10:37 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Usage + Usability

It’s long been that adults look at technology, say they don’t understand it and then point to their children and say something about programming a VCR or sending text messages. “The kids know more than we do,” they say.

I don’t buy it. Just like long division, balancing a checkbook, and managing a daily schedule — it’s well within our power to understand and use mobile technology. And it’s a cop-out to rely on our children to figure it out for us. I also appreciate Darla Mack’s point that good parenting should transcend technology, not use it as a crutch.

Here in the U.S., there’s an ad on television from one of the wireless operators. I’ve seen it once or twice, and the basic plot is that a mother and a daughter are having an argument that is subtitled in text messages. In the end, the daughter wins the arugment. The viewer is left to assume that the reason the daughter has won is because she’s more hip and relevant.

The ad plays on the assumption that — because the child knows and uses the technology — she’s inherently wiser. But there are two things about the ad that rub me the wrong way:

1. It’s bad parenting to get into an argument with a child. Texting doesn’t help this point, but it’s a shame for a major corporation to spend millions on an ad that depicts poor parental role models.
2. Many adults already use technology to reinforce passive aggressive behavior and conflict avoidance, so why are we encouraging it with children and young adults?

And why are we suggesting to adults that they rely on technologies to address topics that are best left to face-to-face communications?

Mobile technologies are truly wonderful, and I cannot imagine how we got along without them. But maybe it’s time for us to take an adult approach towards technology and define when, and in what circumstances, to use technology.

 Doing this will require a challenge to the assumption that kids know more about technology than we do. It will also require for adults to look at their own online behaviors and to determine the ways in which they can improve communications. For we have already used technologies like e-mail as an excuse for approach avoidance and passive agressive behavior. Now we are using ignorance and a desire to be hip, relevant and cool as excuses for setting bad role models.

The last thing we want to tell our children that they know more than we do and that there are places (albeit online and technology-dominated ones) where immature and juvenile behavior is appropriate. One day those children will become adults and will take their online lessons with them.

Comments (1)

More on Pew

May 9, 2007 at 9:10 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0

I read about the Pew Internet & American Life report on Monday, but in a very 0.1 mode downloaded the report and printed out the first ten pages so that I could read them on an airplane. I do enough reading online, so it’s a pleasure to read printed word without a backlight. I did that and was ready to post on it, and then Russell so eloquently hit the high points.

The only stone that Russell left unturned — at least for me — was the prospects for how things will change over the next couple of years.  I tend to see a larger percentage of the “Few Tech Assets” crowd that comprises 49% of the U.S. population according to Pew, and I find myself wondering how things will be different down the road.

Clearly, the “Few Tech Assets” group will decline in size, but which of the other groups will grow? Will it be “Elite Tech Users” (currently 31% of the population)? Or will it be the “Middle-of-the-Road Tech Users” currently at 20% of the U.S. population?

Russell points to the “Mobile Centrics” as one potential growth area. If we see the bulk of user growth in this community, then perhaps the concept of being “online” or even “present” is outmoded.

With mobile devices, we’re connected whenever we need to be. We’re “online” all of the time. And “presence” is simply a matter of responding to interactions.

The point being that 2.0 isn’t just about the evolution of the technology — it’s about the collective experience of the users driving the trend.

I spent my childhood being lectured by baby boomers about how great the 1960’s were. My dalliance in that decade was clearly not enough for me to understand the meaning of the collective experience, but we had the seventies and eighties to re-hash the glory days. Perhaps those stories of shared experience will be joined by an explanation of the birth of the commercial Internet, nostalgia for dial-up and re-worked versions of Mosaic, Archie and Gopher. I recently found myself looking for a version of Lynx that I could run on Windows Vista, so perhaps those days are upon us.

So what will be the shared experience of the “Mobile Centrics?” Will they reminisce about their Sidekicks much in the same way that my contemporaries talk about the Atari 2600, Amiga and TRS-80? How will they define their role? What will they see along the way? What do they see that others cannot?

Comments

A Few Data Points On Mobile Messaging

May 3, 2007 at 2:09 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0

Market research firm J.D. Power and Associates announced the company’s 2007 UK Mobile Telephone Customer Satisfaction Study^SM which provides an few pieces of data relevant to the topic of mobile messaging. In a survey of 2,706 mobile telephone customers (both pre-paid and contract), they found the following changes from 2006 to 2007.

The average number of weekly calls made by pre-pay customers has dropped from 14 in 2006 to 10 per week, and the average number of text messages has stayed the same at 27. Among contract customers, the number of calls made per week has dropped from 35 in 2006 to 27 in 2007, while text messages have increased considerably, from 32 to 46.

With the biggest finding being that although pre-paid customers are flat on SMS, contract customers are making fewer calls and sending more text messages.

This raises the obvious question of whether we — as users — are learning how to use our mobile tools more effectively. We understand the telephone pretty well, but messaging is something that is relatively new for most of us.

Are we learning to replace the telephone with messaging? Or is there more to it than pure substitution?

I’d argue the latter, but I don’t know if the statistics are there to prove it. If users give up eight telephone calls and replace them with fourteen SMS, that’s 1.75 messages per call that would make a strong case for substitution.

So if Mobile Messaging 1.0 is simple and pure substitution of messages for telephone calls, then what would 2.0 be?

Comments