Hand Machines

There's a really interesting article over here — China and the next billion mobile customers (via Semiconducted) — on the topic of the mobile phones in Chinese society. I was surprised to learn, when speaking to some Mozilla contributors from China at the summit, about the near-complete lack of voice mail usage there, something mentioned in this article. There's lots to learn about this space.

A couple of things that fit into place in my head:

1. Prying yourself away from the network

In China, not answering your mobile telephone is considered rude, no matter where you are, whom you are with, the time of day or what activities you are engaged in. And voice mail does not exist. Despite this cultural imperative to be available anytime and anywhere, there is a simple work-around practiced by hundreds of millions of Chinese. Manually removing the telephone battery creates a message to in-coming callers that the telephone's owner is out of range and thus unable to answer the phone. This regular subversion of the cultural imperative functions as an open secret, even playing a prominent role in a popular 2003 Chinese film called Shouji ("mobile telephone").

One of the defining characteristics of mobile users that they are always accessible/available, because their devices, and therefore the network, are always present. This can be great — it's a huge part of the value of mobile, because of the changes in behaviour that it allows (e.g. Shirky's transition from planning to coordination). As always, there are downsides as well. When the option to ignore your device, already rarely-chosen in North America, is actually ruled out as actively rude, the issues with constant availabilty are really thrown into relief.

There are cues and norms associated with being interrupted in "real" non-computer-mediated life, and, to some degree, these have grown up around fixed-place (desktop) computer use. At very least, we have basic tools (setting availability in your IM client) and some circumstantial divisions (if I stick to gmail and stay out of IRC when I'm not working, I won't get work-related messages). This all becomes more complicated when the same devices bridge all parts of our lives, and when the situations that can be interrupted are more varied and sensitive than sitting at a desk.

The ability to be appropriately available is going to be one of those issues around which there's going to be a lot of tweaking and perfecting over the next couple of years, I think. One early simple implication for the design of Fennec, though, is the possibility of a mechanism for setting your availability centrally in the browser, so that that websites and apps can pick it up rather than forcing the user to tell each site that he or she would rather not be bothered. Eventually, we could even start making this smarter, by basing some of it on the users location (taking advantage of GPS), schedule (I'm in a meeting), or even movement.

2. The potential of rich devices

Looking to the future, it is easy to imagine that in the next years China's mobile telephones will become the literal meaning of the Chinese word for mobile phones, shouji, "hand machines." Once rich data transmission becomes massively affordable, the mobile telephone will combine the pervasive, persistent and intimate qualities of existing phones with the internet's near limitless entertainment and communication options.

Literal translations are usually played more for laughs than for insight, but I really like this bit about hand machines. When people are dubious about the value of mobile access to the web and rich devices, it often gets phrased in the form of "Why would I want [a camera/TV/the web/other ability] on my phone?" The Chinese word captures it much better; what you've got isn't a phone – it's a hand machine. Making calls was just the great capability that got you carrying it first (no surprise that it was something to do with being social).

Posted by madhava at August 25, 2008 06:46 PM