Jared Braiterman is a Harvard and Stanford-trained anthropologist (PhD 1996) who has worked for twelve years as a human technology consultant and educator in Silicon Valley, Europe, Asia and the Americas. With his San Francisco-based research and creative studio Giant Ant he recently led a public research study on youth culture and technology called "Mobile China". Now in its fourth year, the project has examined mobile phones, virtual life and mixed reality in the world's biggest emerging market. Braiterman's receiver contribution gets to the heart of the role mobile phones play in China's fast-paced development and tells us why the country has become a hub of passionate technology usage.

http://www.giantant.com | http://www.jaredResearch.com

Artwork by Shi Yu Xun

All artworks in this receiver issue are part of a student project by the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China

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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").

For the technology industry Ð obsessed with inanimate hardware, bandwidth, features, and novelty Ð cultural knowledge and emerging markets such as China are absent in future scenarios of an ever more connected digital world. More typical promises of 4G networks, location-aware services, and a proliferation of sensors conjure a world where machines seamlessly speak and coordinate with other machines, where advertising and the office are ubiquitous, and where consumers willingly pay to improve their decisions. This technological bias has led to a fixation on advanced communication networks in Japan and South Korea.

In creating a public research project called "Mobile China" three years ago, my design anthropology consultancy directed its focus on the human dimension of technology change to the world's most populous nation. The word "mobile" refers not only to the mobile telephone but to the immense human and cultural movement occurring in China: migration from rural villages to dozens of mega-cities, and from central and western interior provinces to eastern coastal provinces. With China's rapid transition from a closed society to a global player in the past twenty years, mobility also refers to dynamic new economic, social and national possibilities. Within the span of a single generation, China has gone from a closed society to the world's fastest growing economy where the young have opportunities and aspirations unimaginable to their parents.

From migrant workers to pre-teens, mobile telephones in China have become pervasive, persistent and intimate. Passionate usage properly describes consumers investing several months' salary in a handset, upgrading handsets once or twice yearly, and sending 20 to 100 text messages per day. During the recent Chinese New Year holidays, it's estimated that over 10 billion text messages were exchanged.

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The enthusiasm of Chinese youth for new technology is captured in a recent study of internet use by United States media company IAC/InterActiveCorporation and J Walter Thompson advertising agency.

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More than twice as many Chinese (86%) as American youth (42%) report "living some of my life online." Showing greater awareness of how digital identities differ from in-person ones, twice as many Chinese (69%) as American youth (28%) have "experimented with how I present myself online." Within a shorter time span, Chinese youth have embraced the internet and begun living part of their lives online with an intensity that seems to exceed that of wealthier nations.

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In the years it will take for the mobile web to be a viable consumer experience, there will remain key differences between internet usage and mobile phone usage in China. Certainly, internet cafés have created another space for youth and young adults outside of work, home and school for as little as 20 cents per hour, and Chinese are amongst the largest enthusiasts for massive multi-player online gaming such as Worlds of Warcraft. Many urban internet cafŽs accommodate hundreds of customers at a time, with flat screen monitors, webcams, headsets and microphones, instant message programs, access to plentiful Korean movies and television shows, and food and beverages.

In comparison to the internet, mobile telephones are truly pervasive, persistent and intimate. Beginning as early as primary school, nearly every city dweller and increasingly more rural villagers have one or more mobile telephones. Unlike the internet, mobile telephones are already in their owners' pockets, purses or hands at all times of day and night. As the opening story illustrated, the expectation is that the phone will always be within reach and always answered. And finally, whereas computers are often shared in internet cafŽs and homes, the mobile telephone belongs to individuals, and both its physical form and its digital contents are considered personal and private.

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Why has China become a center of passionate technology usage? There are two cultural explanations for the intensity with which Chinese have adopted the internet and, even more so, mobile phones:
the single child policy of nearly thirty years, and the dearth of communication and entertainment alternatives.

Beginning in 1979 out of concern for overpopulation, the Chinese government instituted a one child policy that effectively transformed the composition of the typical family. A massive nation of single children has created unprecedented social effects, with family structures now described as "4-2-1" referring to four grandparents, two parents, and one child. There has also been much discussion about whether these single children, nicknamed "little emperors", are stressed from being the sole locus of family concern and aspiration, or spoiled from the attention and indulgence provided by six adults. Without a doubt, both forces shape this unprecedented generation of youth and young adults.

With almost every Chinese person under the age of thirty having no siblings, the implications for communication technologies are clear. From the earliest age, Chinese kids seek peer companionship outside the nuclear family. In interviews with school children, Mobile China documented how parents often buy their children telephones because they want to be able to locate them at any moment. Youth embrace mobile phones as a way to stay in touch with their classmates and friends at all times.

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Like most emerging markets, China lacked the wired telecommunication infrastructure present in Europe and the United States. For China, mobile telephones are not an alternative to land lines, but often the first and only available type of telephone. Text messaging became a mass phenomenon in China much earlier than in the United States as Chinese consumers sought the greatest amount of communication and connection at the very lowest cost. It must be noted that text messaging in Chinese requires greater literacy than in Roman languages: in mainland China, mobile phone users first use the ten key pad to enter words in pinyin, a Mandarin romanization adopted in 1979 (the same year as the one child policy began), and then must choose the correct Chinese character, known as hanzi. Text messaging thus requires fluency in one or two spoken languages and two writing systems.

The low cost and absence of alternatives also explains China's passion around internet usage. In advanced economies, the internet competes with cable television, movies, video games, compact discs, magazines and newspapers. In emerging markets such as China, the internet is the portal for the widest and least expensive information and entertainment.

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.

China and other emerging markets will not repeat the stages of technology that advanced markets already experienced. Just as mobile phones leapfrogged the landline in emerging markets, so the mobile phone will leapfrog the personal computer. Today there are an estimated 3 billion mobile phone users, and 1 billion internet users. The vast majority of the world's population not already online will experience the internet first on a mobile phone rather than a bulky computer tower or notebook computer. With the global prices of hardware and network connections falling dramatically every year, future mobile phones will access the internet with novel and diverse form factors that will all share the phones' essential traits of being pervasive, persistent and intimate.

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Some of the United States' most successful internet companies have entered China in the first years of the twenty-first century, and it is clear by now that none has competed successfully against national Chinese competitors. Google remains in second place to Baidu in web search, eBay trails Taobao in auctions, and Microsoft's MSN has captured far fewer users than Tencent's QQ in instant messaging and online community. Tencent has created a successful business combining internet and mobile telephone services that are engaging, decorative, and low-cost.

China is already the most populous market for technology and will continue to add hundreds of millions of new mobile subscribers and internet users in the next years. European and United States telephone manufacturers and operators need to better understand cultural factors for business success to reach these fast-growing populations. Exporting our best ideas will not be enough to capture the attention of savvy and passionate Chinese consumers. Focusing on the newest hundred million consumers will give Chinese companies more opportunities to serve their domestic markets and to capture new business models throughout the developing world.

Contact: Jared Braiterman

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