Mobile Devices in Public Spaces - Norms of Behavior

Compared to the United States, the culture of mobile phones has a much longer history in the Scandinavian countries and in Japan. With the very early Nordic Mobile Network (NMT) of the 1970s, Nordic countries have the longest experience with mobile devices.

In the early 2000s, in Helsinki, I was living in an apartment with a fixed line. At 6 PM, I called a friend on his mobile. He immediately knew it was me and kept the conversation very brief. Later we met. He told me that he was on a tram when my phone call came to his mobile. There was an unwritten norm that no one made voice calls after 5 PM, when the work day was over. All communicating switched to SMS texting. You could see lots of people in the evenings in bars or coffee shops, staring at their mobile phones, often smiling. The whole system of communication changed to the less intrusive, more polite text format when office hours were over. All ringtones were turned off and vibrating modes were on. I saw the same thing sitting with 6 Swedes at a restaurant at lunch hour -- in the early 1990s. All had their mobiles out, all were looking at texting and vibrating signals, no one had a ringtone on in a public place.

In Japan, with average commutes of 1-2 hours on trains each way, and with voice calls prohibited, there is texting and gaming going on in a big way. In fact, NTT DoCoMo was able to take advantage of this "captive in trains" audience to create the world's first successful m-commerce platform in the form of the 2.5G (rudimentary by today's standards) iMode service from about 2000. You would never hear a ringtone in a public place in Japan.

So, two things seem to drive the emergence of norms about appropriate "mobile behaviors" -- length of time (years of experience with mobile) and the culture of the place itself (loud "gringo" cultures like USA and India are less likely to establish and adhere to norms compared to polite cultures such as that of Japan).

Anything that is absorbing and self-referential (such as mobile devices and gaming devices) detract from the enriching qualities of good, lively face-to-face conversation. One of my colleagues -- very professional, highly educated, very polite -- sits through entire meetings with eyes glued to her mobile-cum-PDA device 90% of the time. It is silent, and she pushes buttons and uses the stylus pen occasionally to do things, but one gets the feeling (wrong feeling, I am sure) that she is "not fully into what's going on."

The culture of mobile devices in public spaces is moving and evolving all the time. It is reshaping life all over the planet, and needs to studied constantly.

Nik Dholakia
University of Rhode Island

Mobile & Wireless: Intelligent Research-based Insights

With over two billion users at the end of 2005 on this planet of 6.5 billion people, mobile and wireless communications technologies have become the biggest personal-use technologies in human history. In this blog, a group of close-knit experts working at various global locations and collaborating with Professor Nik Dholakia at the University of Rhode Island, provide you unique and research-based insights about the past, present, and future of businesses based on mobile and wireless technologies.

We hope you will find the ideas presented in the various articles in this blog of value -- both as insights into successful business strategies and as intellectual resources about the new world that is evolving from the mobile and wireless technologies. Many of the posts would be open to comments by readers. We hope therefore to see your "e-reactions" to the articles, and to establish global conversations on topics of interest.

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Nik Dholakia, Ph.D.
University of Rhode Island
USA