I am sure that a lot of you have already come across CNN Money’s article on why SMS and text messaging have not taken off here in the United States as opposed to how insanely popular the technology has become overseas.

Here is my lengthy reaction.

The article, by Paul Kedrosky the executive director of the William J. von Liebig Center for Entrepreneurism and Technology Advancement at the University of California at San Diego and a VC with Canadian firm Ventures West, is pretty reassuring that even though Americans don’t use SMS (text messaging) it’s just a matter of time and as Russell Buckley from Mobhappy once said (Russell you will have to help me out as to which post this was) when SMS hits it big in America it will surpass what they doing with the technology even in Europe.

I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly. What I do not a agree with is the statement that “the right way to think about text messaging for now is to bring successful SMS services tested elsewhere to the United States.” I always find it interesting when foreign companies try to enter the U.S. market. Some have been successful, but mostly in infrastructure. (WiderThan, SK, Comverse, etc.) Consumer content is hard to do, particularly when you bring your local wisdom to the table. I am reminded of a quote from one of the founders of UPOC, Greg Clayman, that I once heard in a presentation urging caution about trying to replicate the success of a foreign phenomenon in another market:

“In Japan they eat squid pizza. That isn’t coming to the U.S. anytime soon.”

As the article puts it, “rather than substituting for PC-based communication, as it does in poorer countries, mobile messaging Stateside will untether commerce, social networks, and other applications originally tied to PCs.” But the domination of the PC will not just up and disappear. Rather, the real successful US SMS applications will be those that are mobile components of already existing internet phenomena. By this I do not mean that it will be something as putting MySpace onto a mobile phone. I don’t think thats a very important idea. Rather, its a matter of what MySpace can leverage with the mobile medium and how people use cell phones.

The other successful applications will be entirely mobile and unique to the ways the mobile medium are used. However, while foreign SMS examples may be a leading indicator of what will happen in the United States, when SMS booms Stateside it will be because of a home grown phenomena, one that grows from an American Gestalt and that most American’s “get” in a ubiquitous no brainer kind of way. It will not be via a foreign consumer content clone marketing its way into an American culture.

According to the article the bulk of SMS traffic (overseas) is simple messaging between friends, which doesn’t present many opportunities for entrepreneurs. Perhaps not, or perhaps the magic of that kind of social networking has not yet been tapped (SMS.ac, Rabble and Juice Wireless would beg to differ). It is on this very concept of text messaging that statements like “if you want to get a taste for this revolution, you’ll have to head abroad” are a little misguided.

Oddly enough, in terms of using the word “revolution,” if you want to see a world wide example of how and where SMS has been virally and openly successful (both in the US and abroad) one merely has to look at the way it has integrated with politics.

There have been a plethora of examples of political uses of SMS overseas (from my old blog) … South Africa South Korea, the Philippines, etc. What can political organizers in the US learn from these examples, and in what ways is the US political playing field different from Europe and the rest of the world, when it comes to mobile? There are no doubt substantial differences in the ways that the United States and the rest of the world use and perceive the mobile medium. And excuse me for getting philosophical here, but these differences are in fact rooted in the different ways technology is perceived, amongst other things. This is especially the case when it comes to PC’s, mobile devices and the online world of the Internet.

Take Japan for example, back in 1999 when NTT DoCoMo paved the way for mobile Internet service with its i-mode network. Mobile phone use in Japan is more pervasive in the actions of everyday life then it is anywhere in the world. A lot of the new technology and social software built for the mobile phone, or as its called in Japan, keitai, is developed in Japan and is used there before anywhere else. Japanese consumers can do a plethora of things with their keitai that force it into these social spaces. For example, Japanese citizens can buy train fair using their keitai, as well as take pictures of barcodes to comparison shop right from the store. The list goes on and grows everyday. The point is, anywhere you go in Japan you will see a Japanese citizen using his or her cell phone for something. Academics studying the cultural implications of the new technology have coined the term “keitai culture” to help explain the phenomenon. Pop-culture news and media have even picked up the term in an act of postmodern legitimacy. In Japan, more connections are made to the Internet through keitai than through any other broadband option.

Some experts locate the rapid development of the mobile medium as a direct reaction to the digital divide. As the CNN Money article states “The opportunities start with understanding economic and cultural factors that drive usage. Pay-as-you-go cell-phone plans offered abroad encourage text-message use, as does the fact that in most countries, fewer people own PCs on which to send instant messages and e-mail.” While the cost of broadband connection being substantially more expensive than i-mode has a lot to do with it, it is also extremely important to note that for most Japanese consumers their first interaction with the Internet is and was via their keitai. When a Japanese mobile user wants to send a “text-message” to another mobile user, for example, he or she is more likely to send that message by means of Email then SMS. Most Japanese users email each other over mobile phones as what we know as SMS is only available to someone that has the same carrier you have. This is, of course, directly opposed to the American experience where most people feel more comfortable using their PC to access the Internet and Email. If an American is going to send a text message from their phone to another mobile user, SMS is the only real first option that comes to mind. And whereas keitai is seamless with everyday life, the PC requires abrupt attention to a specific location. It requires you to stop what you are doing and go online. Keitai, in the words of Keitai culture expert Mizuko Ito, “functions more as a medium of lightweight ‘refreshment’ analogous to sipping a cup of coffee or taking a cigarette break.” It’s a small moment of our lives with a substantial importance. The PC Internet is another social space, a cyberspace, as opposed to the mutual “co-presence” of keitai.

There is a famous Farside cartoon of two dogs, one of which is sitting on a chair in front of a computer. The dog on the chair has his paw on the mouse and is looking down at the other dog, which is sitting on the floor. The caption under the cartoon reads, “On the Internet no one knows you’re a dog.” The PC Internet model is based on a type of engagement, which because of its stationary functionality puts an emphasis on virtuality and alternate spaces such as cyberspaces. This is because we must interrupt what we perceive to be our “real-life” in order to go to wherever our or a computer may be. Once there, because we have interrupted our personal space we are in another space such as cyberspace. While the networks of communication that take place within the alternate spaces of cyberspace may in fact transform social networks in “real-life,” they still never really leave the notions of separateness. For example, a lot of people claim that the success of the Republican parties online campaign strategy in the 2004 elections rested in their ability to motivate people online and take the action off-line. These very notions of “on-line” identities and “off-line” identities prove the distinctions still exist. It is this view of an altered space that allows us to view the Internet as a universal standard to strive for, one that cross-culturally avoids the plural messes of everyday life. And it is on the basis of this kind of Internet discourse that metaphors such as the digital divide, those that can afford to have this Internet model and those that cannot, are created.

The relationship between the recipient and the message delivered by the mobile medium is distinct from other modes of Internet communication in a very philosophical and personal way. It is not cut off from everyday realities, spaces and social identities. It is not escapist. There are never any distinctions of on-line and off-line. The communication of mobiles is always seamlessly integrated with the social spaces of everyday life. It always involves a tension between ones surroundings and the tiny screen in the palm of ones hand. Studies in Japan, for example, have shown that people don’t use anonymity when it comes to communication over mobile. On your mobile, everyone knows you’re a dog. Mobile users are always both present as well as distant, private as well as public. It is not tied to any location and can be accessed any time and place. Mobile communications, of any kind, always occur in the real world and are thus part of that world. And this is why mobile communications are located in specific social and local context and vary wherever they are. They break the hegemony of the universal solution offered by the PC Internet model and create new discourses of Internet use based on more local / social contexts. As I mentioned before, this can be extremely powerful. The point is, it is important to remember, when starting your mobile campaign, that location is everything and the mobile content works best when it integrates with the mobile users surroundings. This is why I feel that the MobileVoter project will be so successful, especially the part that takes into account the moments of everyday life in convenient stores or getting a cup of coffee… or the BubbleTea shops. Because that too is also what mobile communication is all about, it’s a lightweight refreshment that doesn’t require the pulling away of attention from life that PC models do… Checking your mobile, sending an SMS, playing a game, downloading a ringtone… all these are things you do as you are stepping into the office, or waiting on-line at the store or taking a mental break during a business meeting. Mobile phones are portable water coolers in that they provide opportunities for lightweight refreshment and conversation. But as anyone who has ever had water-cooler conversations knows, these small moments can have great importance later.

And it is partly because of this polarity in perception that the mobile medium has had a tough time moving beyond the phone call in the United States. When looking at Internet technologies from the perspective of PC based Internet most American mobile users and businesses perceive the mobile Internet as ‘second-rate’ access, something good to have when you don’t have your PC or laptop. It’s good for making phone-calls (and in America even that is questionable). The problem with this model of Internet, when applied to the mobile medium is that it assumes a universally desirable technological resource whereas the mobile medium both infiltrates and adapts to the structures of existing practices and places. An economic understanding of the mobile revolution can only go so far. A different means of information technology communication (the mobile medium) did not only develop out of economic necessity but also came to be precisely because alternative trajectories of IT and communications discourse could and needed to exist. This is why we find mobile enterprises and innovations mostly arising in Europe and Asia where the American Internet discourse does not hold its hegemonic hold.

So what the Japanese model teaches us is that the “American” way of thinking about and perceiving the Internet is not the only way and that “portable, lightweight engagement” to quote Ito again, “form an alternative constellation of ‘advanced’ Internet access characteristics that stand in marked contrast to complex functionality and stationary immersive engagement.” The differences here are between networked infrastructures that base themselves on a cross-cultural universal model (the PC internet) and a network built on a true network of shifting localities and cultures (the mobile medium). Neither one is better than the other, that’s not the point here. The point is to show that they are different and that problems only occur when one discourse dominates the way we perceive the other.

Nevertheless, the rapid advancement of the mobile medium has disrupted the geo-political discourse surrounding information and communication technology and with that has greatly influenced politics itself. But this is not necessarily a give in. For when it comes to political usages of keitai in Japan, the mobile buzz becomes eerily quiet. It seems odd, right? The country with the most pervasive use of the most advanced phones and social software is not using the technology politically in any substantial way. Yet, you introduce mobile technology to a country like the Philippines or into various regions in Africa (and even here in the United States) and it becomes political almost immediately. I repeat the words of Clayman again. “In Japan they eat squid pizza. That isn’t coming to the U.S. anytime soon.”

Now, there are a number of reasons why this may be the case and perhaps it is important for political marketers to study this relationship further. But whatever the reasons are, it makes one extremely important point. When it comes to integrating the mobile medium into politics just focusing on the technology is not the right way to go. Unlike the stationary PC, mobile communications are located in the very social, cultural and historical contexts in which they are physically used. No one in the Phillippines, for example, signed up to receive any text message alerts should a need for social or political protesting arise. The SMS that led to the People Power II demonstration was spread by no other means than the insanely viral communication of peer-to-peer / friend-to-friend networks. In other words, the mobile technology was used exactly how it was meant to be used. The political momentum against then president Joseph Estrada was already in place. SMS was merely the tool used to organize around and communicate a cause.

But there was nothing magical or spontaneous about it. Text messaging and the mobile medium is not a persuasion tool. Rather, it enables already established means of communication to evolve in new and wonderful ways. The technology is used to support a purpose, not the other way around. The same is true about the stories of SMS being used in Argentina to save the Rain Forest or to sign petitions for women’s rights in Africa. So what can U.S organizers learn from the success of political uses of SMS abroad? To use my favorite quote from Howard Rheingold’s book SmartMobs, “The killer apps of tomorrows mobile infocom industry won’t be hardware devices or software programs but social practices.” I guess, to sum it up I would say that first they need to start thinking about technology differently and that secondly they need to focus on the social discourses that surround that technology.

In the United States we have already seen a text message explosion on the political scene. First there was TxtMob during the Republican and Democratic National Conventions (txtmob), the use of a text message alert service by the People for the American Way, as well as many other small projects that can be seen as minor explosion in their own right.

Like in countries where politics and SMS have clashed, the mobile medium will have the greatest affect on American politics in the places where already existing networks of communication mix with a strong political momentum. In other words, just as the most successful mobile campaigns abroad are on the grassroots level, the future of mobile politics in the United States will be the same. Because the mobile medium is a medium you have with you at all times the location where these devices are used determines a lot. When it comes to the implications of mobile technology location, like in real estate, is everything. There are so many local issues for campaigns to “mobilize” around and each community already has its well-established networks of peer-to-peer communication to make this possible.

What is to be learned from this? The political usages of SMS have, in the viral sense of the word, surpassed what SMS can do on just a purely marketing level. Jed Alpert who is the CEO of Rights-Group/Politixt which is best known for its involvement in the People for American Way Mass Immediate Response team in which PFAW activists could sign up to receive SMS activist alerts during the Supreme Court nominations (mentioned above) pointed out that the political use of the SMS technology was 10X more successful than the Brittany Spears horoscope campaign is was originally written for. While the entertainment side of Rights-Media wanes and wavers with mix results every political use of the medium has resulted in mind blowing surprising numbers. “Its all about passion,” Alpert tells me, “people are passionate about politics, they are not passionate about an SMS diaper coupon”

The mobile medium is really just a perfect tool for activists, especially when you consider how you could use mobile technology to coordinate at events where people are away from their home and or their place of work. Mobile can perform a really useful function there. And people at home watching the event on TV or the Internet can even use their mobile devices to chime in. The educated middle classes that are often the target of Internet activism already have the Internet they are used to. And for that population, the only time when mobile really makes sense is when you are on location, as you saw at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. At the RNC and DNC protesters used SMS bulletin board like services such as Txtmob and Upoc to coordinate strategy in real-time and proved to be extremely successful. That is one place where it makes sense to be coordinating physical Meetup like activities over mobile.

So already, the first real successful integration of mobile technology and politics in the United States was on the grass-roots level. And as Japan proves, if there is no political climate the tech won’t be political. As I said before, the mobile medium is not a persuasion tool. You can’t create a mobile revolution without the revolution. So the use of the mobile medium by political campaigners will not be successful unless there is a lot of political momentum and interest around the candidate. This does not mean that campaigns or national politics won’t find the mobile medium useful. They will. But they will find it useful only in a very limited way on the local grassroots level. This could be extremely strategic for a campaign that wanted to use important local issues to mobilize support for a candidate. But they must also be willing to give up some control and allow the network to do its job as it will or will not by itself.

Nevertheless, when the mobile revolution truly hits the United States, its political pervasiveness will inevitably be on the grassroots level.

But, once again, there is one important thing to remember. The mobile medium is not the “new computer.” It is the new phone. It is not a second rate means of accessing the Internet. Nor is it the “new internet.” It is simply a new, portable and lightweight way to approach the Internet, which in turn, will completely re-conceptualize the way in which we think about the Internet. Incorporating mobile technology into a political campaign has got to move beyond the same old e-mail / database way of doing things. It has to incorporate the already established networks that mobile users already take part in which includes the social spaces and conversations of everyday life.

Marketers need to tap this momentum. And I have heard examples of where they have… I have heard a company claim that while it increased it SMS rates to vote on a popular British TV show, the tie in that some of the money went to charity kept user rates from decreasing. The mobile phone is a personal device and people are a lot less resistant to letting legitimate causes interact with them in this way. Pure marketing, on the other hand is a little bit more scary to people, especially American’s.

So while agree with the articles assessment that when it comes to the text messaging phenomena it’s simply a matter of critical mass, with people adopting SMS because their friends are using it the momentum that comes to eventual adoption is more home grown and does not need to look overseas for inspiration. If we look in the right places we can see that it is already here, in our own way and ripe for the picking.

Technorati Tags: cnn, keitai, mizuku ito, n70, pc, people power, pfaw, philosophy, politics, politxt, smartmobs, sms, text messaging, textmob, txtpower, uppoc, usa

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 at 11:07 pm and is filed under SMS/TXT/MMS, International. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.