Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, you might want to keep your sexting between just you and your significant other. According to a study released by mobile social network Mocospace, one out of three of their users admitted to flirting with someone else via their phone, while on a date.

Mocospace surveyed around 20,000 of their 10.3 million members about their texting habits. In addition to the flirt-texting, the survey revealed that 57% have used a mobile phone to end a relationship, 48% with a text message. While the numbers seem high, MocoSpace claims that most of its users are under the age of 30, making the report believable.

[via techcrunch]

Unless you live under a rock, you've heard about Tiger Woods and his risqué text messaging. It's an instance of "sexting," which is equally impossible to avoid. According to a new study by MTV and the AP, 1/3 of adolescents admit to the practice. Unlike analog promiscuity, texting has major privacy implications. Once content becomes digital, it can often find its way to being public and almost impossible to destroy. In Tiger Woods' case: an explosion in mass media coverage and damaged reputations.

It seems that even with this risk, users would rather take a chance over dropping the technology altogether. Or we simply fail to use long-term thinking. With this in mind, perhaps there is a compromise to be found in this privacy/technology conflict, something that Japan's advanced mobile society has already tried to tackle. The popularity of clamshell devices in Japan has been attributed to the privacy they afford.  Privacy screens that shield a phone's display from wandering eyes are also common. Another solution is a "secret history." The Financial Times reports:

A recent survey by Macromill, an online researcher, showed that 61 per cent of respondents – in this case Japanese mothers with young children – secretly check the contents of their husband’s mobile phone. Of that figure, 35 per cent are checking to see if their husbands are having an affair, while 28 per cent are checking to see if their other half is hiding something from them.

For those husbands (or wives) who do have something, or someone, to hide, some handsets offer a function that can prevent certain phone numbers or e-mails being recorded in the incoming and outgoing call/mail history.

As mobile technology becomes increasingly ingrained in our society, new behaviors will arise. With them will come problems, which further innovations will look to solve. For instance, Firefox private browsing was developed when users' searching histories came back to bite them. We in no way condone Tiger Woods' all-out sexting, but it is obvious that, for his brand, a secret history would've trumped accidental transparency.

LG has a new series of commercials featuring James Lipton, the host of Inside the Actor's Studio. Positioned as public service announcements, these ads urge teens to "give it a ponder" before sexting or spreading Gossip Girl-style texts.
This particular ad features a teen boy, Stephan, who is having a "steamy back and forth text with his girlfriend Zoë" and is about to send her a "pic of his junk."

While the ad is worth watching just to hear Lipton say these words, do they ring true?

The warning seems to be justified. According to a survey fielded by TRU:

• 18% of teen boys and 22% of teen girls say they have sent/posted nude or seminude pictures or video of themselves
• 71% of teen girls and 67% of teen guys who have sent or posted sexually suggestive content say they have sent/posted this content to a boyfriend/girlfriend.
• 36% of teen girls and 39% of teen boys say it is common for nude or semi-nude photos to get shared with people other than the intended recipient.
• 38% of teen girls and 39% of teen boys say they have had sexually suggestive text messages or emails— originally meant for someone else—shared with them.

So what did teens think? Rebecca Cullers at AdFreak did a (very) informal opinion poll:

My husband happens to have a whole class of 9th graders who saw the ads during homeroom. What did they say? "Why does she have a beard? I don't get it. That's retarded."

Perhaps Lipton's beard-scratching pontification isn't as well-known amongst the under-30 set, but now they will likely know him as "the old guy who says 'tweets about his piece' in that weird commercial."

Truth in Advertising is a running series of television commercials that portray consumers using mobile technology in their everyday life. They take a look at how brands are demonstrating our want and need for mobility. Click here to view previous entries.

Language is a living thing, constantly evolving to reflect the world we live in. Today, the hyperfast pace of technological innovation is a major force driving linguistic change -- and not just acronymatic txtspk. Real words to capture the zeitgeist and express new concepts and constructs.

Many of these neologisms come from teens and the tech community. While these groups have always had their own slang, it's increasingly filtering up into common parlance, even (offline) dictionaries. Witness "unfriend", named 2009 Word for the Year by the linguistic gatekeepers at The New Oxford American Dictionary.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.

"It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. While sites like Urban Dictionary and Word Spy chronicle new words as they are coined, traditional dictionaries are understandably a bit more discriminating, so its interesting to see what makes their cut. This is certainly an indicator of the influence that young people and the web have on everyone's daily lives and our culture as a whole.

Here are some other youth and tech-inspired neologisms that Oxford was considering:

• hashtag – a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets

• intexticated – distracted because texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle

• netbook – a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory

• paywall – a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers

• sexting – the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone

What else do you think they should have considered?

Cabbies Stay on Their Phones Despite Ban [NYTimes]
Debates about banning texting for all drivers point to the inefficiency of the NYC ban for cabbies, which has been in effect for over 10 years now, but seldom obeyed or enforced.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on Mobile, Broadband, iPhone & Innovation [GigaOM]
The FCC's new creed is competition, consumers, innovation, and investment. The chairman states that he is heavily invested in developing a broader, consumer driven mobile offering.

Goldman Sachs: BlackBerry, iPhone own smartphones [ZDNet]
Findings from a Goldman Sachs report on smartphones in the workplace: Employees want iPhones but are getting Blackberrys; fidelity is high when it comes to the device less so to the carrier; and 55% use the their smartphone for personal as well as business matters.

RingtoneStudio for iPhone: $10 of Purchase Price Goes to One Laptop Per Child Program [MobileContentToday]
RingtonStudio, a $29.95 iPhone app, is partnering with the OLPC program and giving $10 of each app sale to the charity. So much for micropayments...

Sexting 'Absolutely Mortified Me' [BBC Newsbeat]
New public awareness campaigns are trying to curb the "sexting" trend by making kids aware of the consequences.

How True is the Promise of a “Flat world” ? [Priyanka’s Blog]
Data shows that college students are using social networks to primarily communicate with groups of real-life friends, which are defined by education, race, income, and gender. Some may claim this damages the idea that SNS unite people form all walks of life, but perhaps it just depends on the content and dynamics of a particular social network.

A Third of Young People Would Not Pay for Music Online [The Guardian]
Research for the E.U. has found that 33% of 16-24 year olds are unwilling to pay for music and videos no matter what type of payment scheme is offered.

Ad-supported content, Out: Paid Content, In? [Fast Company]
In 2008, for the first time, people used more paid content than ad-supported stuff, according to a new survey. However, people are being a bit particular about which content they pay for--the changeover between ad-supported and paid content came from people reading books (including ebooks) and watching cable TV rather than reading newspapers or magazines.

Advertising and the Future of Wireless [Network World]
To offset this cost and raise the appeal of LBS, carriers are looking to integrate ads into their business solutions.

Can Texting Bring Teens, Parents Closer 2gether? [Salt Lake Tribune]
Many kids are teaching their parents to text, letting them communicate on their terms. From “where are you?” to “make your bed”, many are finding texting is the best way to be heard.

Mobile Junkies Hard to Reach with Other Media [MarketingVOX]
Mobile Video viewers are avid mobile users, new data shows. 78% rely on their mobile for up-to-the-minute info, 71% prefer to receive info via mobile internet, and 50% spend more time away from computers than in front of them.

Mobile Virtual World [Cellufun]
Cellufun, the community known as "The World's Mobile Playground," announced that they’ve past 2 million registered mobile users. The company cites new mobile operator partners, avatars, virtual goods, innovative games, and friend features for their substantial increase in registration traffic over the last quarter.

Sexting (v) - v: the act of text messaging someone in the hopes of having a sexual encounter with them later; initially casual, transitioning into highly suggestive and even sexually explicit.

There's been a LOT of media coverage surrounding this new "trend." Much of it was spurred by the case of a few cheerleaders who took naked photos of themselves with their cameraphones and sent them to their boyfriends. The girls were kicked out of school, prompting their parents to sue.

Sexting (short for "sex text messaging") even made USA Today with the headline "Flirting goes high-tech with racy photos shared on cellphones, Web." Quoted in the article was a new study from Cosmogirl and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy:

About a third of young adults 20-26 and 20% of teens say they've sent or posted naked or semi-naked photos or videos of themselves, mostly to be "fun or flirtatious," a survey finds.

A third of teen boys and 40% of young men say they've seen nude or semi-nude images sent to someone else; about a quarter of teen girls and young adult women have. And 39% of teens and 59% of those ages 20-26 say they've sent suggestive text messages.

Reading through all these articles, you'd think every kid was doing it. 20% is still significant, but is this an epidemic? The behavior is certainly alarming parents and newscasters, prompting them to fret about the dangers of texting. "What is going on? Is there no just shame anymore with a lot of our young girls?"

Well, first lets look at the why. These girls have grown up on-screen, be it in home movies or MySpace profiles. Their lives are lived in the story--the telling and the showing. They also think that their value lies in their bodies. This is part of pop culture. Heck, it's almost an honor for actresses to pose for Maxim, Playboy and the like. But also keep in mind that girls probably don't intend for these to go public (though they will, of course...) Girls are feeling pressure to compete with online porn, to make the real thing as enticing as the digital.

Some are calling for the ban of the cameraphone. According to Nielsen Mobile, about 80% of teens 13-17 and 93% of those 18-24 use cellphones and most of these have built-in cameras. So should parents pluck them form their kids hands? Is that the answer? Maybe we should ask John Lithgow in Footloose.

The truth is that porn spurs technology. Sex is an early adopter and a prime motivator. You can see this in the evolution of books, magazines, video, websites, 3D, virtual reality, sensory technology.... Not to say that we should encourage porn among teens, just that it's not freakish. It's pretty natural. And Puritan fear should not impede progress. How about education as a solution? What about media literacy programs in schools and at home? Sure, we can ring the alarm, but let the cellphone ring as well!