Seminario del 10 marzo: Naomi Baron

16.30-18.00: Naomi Baron, Thinking about Mobile Phones: How Italians compare with Other Cultures

To begin with, I am awfully sorry for those of you who expected an Italian summary of today’s seminar. I am afraid you will not have it, since I made the decision to give my personal account of the lesson in the same language as it was taught: English (which is not my mother tongue, so I beg your pardon for mistakes you may find).

Taught is maybe not the right word to describe what was rather an informal seminar, an opportunity to share our views on ongoing research and on results that have already come up.

It was a round table, in its literal meaning, given that we were all sitting around a table, eager to listen to Professor Naomi Baron and to possibly give our own contribution to her research.

I must admit I did not know that students at Modena University were involved in Baron’s Online Survey. So I found myself somehow in medias res, that is to say in the middle of something already going on thanks to the kind help of Professor Marina Bondi and her students.

I therefore listened as much as possible, to bridge my knowledge gap and to understand how Italians compare with Swedes, Americans, Japanese and Koreans with respect to mobile phones.

I have to say that Professor Naomi Baron was very helpful. She first set things in context and introduced the central questions of her study, which you may also find in her book “Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World” (2008), and which she briefly summarized in her handout:

- Does technology shape the way we use language?
- Do information and communication technologies (ICTs) alter: a) mode of social interaction; b) individual thinking?

And in a Cross-Cultural perspective,

- Do different cultures use language technologies the same way?
- What factors shape use of ICTs across nations? (cost, experience with technology, novelty, actual cultural differences).

After introducing the topic using the handout (cause, and I agree, she still believes in handouts), Baron got to the heart of the American University Cross-Cultural Mobile Phone Project. She went through the components, the choice of countries, the subject pool and the dates of survey administration, underlining how research is more often than not influenced by people, and countries, proving more cooperative and willing to do the survey rather than by random sampling.

Baron then went into the details of the survey, and stressed the importance of open-ended questions such as: “What are the 3 words you think of when you think of mobile phones?”

After reading the 2 research questions (which reminded me of Bondi’s lesson dating back to February, 13th), and namely:

RQ1: Are there national differences in the way university students freely associate words with the term “mobile phone”? If so, do the differences reflect cultural differences or some other factor(s)?
RQ2: Are there national differences in the frequency with which university students offer a first word relating to talking or to text messaging? If so, do these differences reflect cultural differences or some other factor(s),

we had a look at the first results. I will not go into the details now, since the research has not been published yet and I think we should all wait for the work coming soon. (You can anyway photocopy my slides as soon as we see each other if you want to).

But before concluding I would like to give you a few examples of how, by looking at apparently sterile and unfriendly data, we can understand a lot of the people, and the cultures, involved (whatever meaning you give to the word culture).

By comparing “3 words” responses in Sweden, US, Italy, Japan and Korea, we can for instance observe that the coding category communication is dominant among Italians, meaning that they think of the mobile phone first of all as a means of communication.

We may find that cost issues in Italy are up to 6.9%, which is a noticeably higher percentage if compared with other countries.

We may also find that Americans and Japanese are more judgmental, meaning that they show more positive and negative evaluation than others. And so on and so forth.

I know that these raw numbers and considerations are not telling you (the absent) as much as they told us (the present). No matter how hard I try, I am sure I cannot convey the impression I had while listening to Naomi Baron, or rather, while participating in her seminar.

I was curious and surprised at the same time, and happy to know things I did not have a clue of before. I had no idea, for example, of the fact that Japanese do not use their mobile phones on trains (or public transports in general), because it is considered as impolite.

I did not know, moreover, that mobiles are priced differently in the States, so that, for example, Americans are not aware of the costs of voicemail.

I did not know that in the US parents generally pay for their children’s mobile, since they have cheap family plans also including the kids’ mobile phones.

I was only subjectively aware of the fact than SMS play such an important role in people aged from 18 to 24 in Italy (the survey’s subject pool).

And, most importantly, I was really surprised when Naomi Baron asked for our feedback, making us feel important in order to interpret her data, and make them speak about us and our culture. This is how we got to the differences between landline and mobile phones and to much more I will not mention here.

The last thing I would like to mention is the kindness of Professor Baron, who was not worried about my likely summary of her seminar on dailynterpreter (and my mentioning of forthcoming data), but rather glad to share her views with as many people as possible.

Let me seize this opportunity to reassert that sharing is also at the basis of this blog, since I am strongly convinced I have nothing to lose in sharing my opinions, experience and materials. On the contrary, I think I have a lot to gain from daily and your feedback