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Turns Towards
About 7 minutes spent watching the body language of a telephone conversation on a Tokyo side-street. The conversationalist spent most of his time turned to the wall, or more accurately turned to the 'corner' afforded by the pipe and the wall (the lady looking up the street was not with him and quicky moved on). But why?
It's an extreme example of not wanting to disturb other people with details of the call. It is more usual to see Japanese people to move to take a call out of earshot and/or to cup the hand around the mouthpiece and speak quietly.
What devices are associated with carrying out what anti-social activities? Anti-social to whom and in what contexts? Mobile phone's and talking loudly, electric batons and torture. Does taking out an object imply intent to carry out a particular task? And how does the perception of devices/services and their associated tasks evolve as the majority of users switch from early adopters (with their inherent behaviours) to more mainstream users? How does this perception change as the range of features offered by that device changes? How would people react to a stun gun that is mostly used to kills bugs?
Can and should we create a feedback loop to help user's better understand the social reaction to utilizing technologies? Can we demystify technologies to lessen the social reaction in the first place?
Writing from Tokyo | March 26, 2006 | Permalink
Comments
Perhaps a different version of the built-in decibel meter, this time it measures the speaker's spoken volume level and alerts them if they are too loud.
Many otherwise well-mannered people will speak (far!) more loudly into a mobile phone than they would to the person next to them. The audio equalizing technology in the phones doesn't punish them for yelling (the receiver hears a normalized volume), but it doesn't reward them for speaking quietly (in which case the reciever hears almost the exact same volume on their end).
Posted by: Andrew at March 26, 2006 11:58 PM
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Posted by: sqnahwdz bnsawg at July 24, 2008 5:44 PM
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Posted by: sqnahwdz bnsawg at July 24, 2008 5:45 PM
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Posted by: sqnahwdz bnsawg at July 24, 2008 5:45 PM