In 2011, when I was researching and writing this book two very strange things happened. Firstly, there were two unprecedented earthquakes in both Japan and New Zealand – the former being the largest ever recorded accompanied by a devastating tsunami. Japan’s deathtoll alone exceeded 20,000 (or about 4 world trade centers by comparison). The scale of such disaster is unimaginable for the world who can but look on with disbelief and a sense of impotence.

The second strange occurrence is what happened next. In the face of disaster, one expects a gamut of emotions: pain, anger, frustration, anxiety. You’d expect many to give up hope, to simply accept the fragility of human life and the futility of planning for a future that may never arrive. But, rather than compound the negative sentiments of those impacted by the quakes, the opposite happened. Following both quakes, official sources reported suicide rates actually fell.

It seems that in times of despair, when the world around you appears like the set of The Day After Tomorrow, people find social meaning. Communities pull together, neighbors help each other and social bonds are re-established. It’s a phenomenon documented in how New Yorkers reacted to 9/11, how the communities of South London turned up with their broomsticks after the riots of 2011 and how we react to earthquakes. It makes us feel connected.

Facebook is targeting youth as key to maintaining its future relevance. Staying relevant means finding better ways to connect in these everyday interactions and this innovation will emerge from the unstructured environment. Facebook needs to go beyond its traditional structured approach to engagement (Hackathon) and invest more in everyday interactions.

In a recent quarterly earnings call, Google’s CEO Larry Page emphasized the need for reinventing Motorola by creating better experiences.

But reinventing the experience will take time. The company noted it had inherited a 12 to 18 month product pipeline from Motorola. While Google has a legacy of successful innovation, there are no guarantees with Motorola.

In this document, I outline my recommendations for Google in implementing a 2-step strategy for Motorola:

1. Focus on the Basics: Focus on doing the common things uncommonly well (the basics of smartphone ownership)
2. Build your Beachheads: Identify and build on existing Beachheads to co-create the user experience with young Fans.

Mobile phones in North Korea

Only a few select elite party officials own mobile phones in the hermit kingdom.

In writing the book All is Social, I wrote about how all forms of communication and connection were controlled by the state. One particular example included the control of home radio sets by the Electric Wave Inspection Bureau. The Bureau were charged with policing the ownership and use of home radios. Each home had to have one and, importantly, each radio had only one preset channel. If you tampered with the official channel you could end up in jail or in a hard labor camp.

Mobile phones did become available in the mid 2000s but a rather contrived “terrorist attack” on a military train led news sources pointing the blame at revolutionaries with “mobile phones”. Since then private mobile phone ownership was banned.

This week, foreign news sources report that visitors to the DPRK will in fact be able to bring in their  own mobile phones (but with heavy restrictions).

Highly secretive North Korea has a domestic Intranet service with a limited number of users. Analysts say access to the Internet is for the country’s super-elite only, meaning a few hundred people or maybe 1000 at most.

… Foreigners need to fill out a form to provide their phone’s IMEI – International Mobile Station Equipment Identity – number with North Korea’s customs agency to bring in their personal device.

What makes this interesting is 2 precedents:

Firstly, in writing the book The Mobile Youth: Voices of the Mobile Generation I found that even in the most controlling regimes (like Saudi Arabia), ownership of mobile phones by youth was a key step towards accessing alternative narratives – ideas that the state would consider contrary to the monolithic loudspeaker ideology it perpetuates through media.

Secondly, it was the slow creep of foreign items that undermines Loudspeaker ideologies. In East Germany, access to western music, radio sets and blue jeans were a key aspect in annealing the younger generation to direct their energies against a regime which publicly excoriated the virtues of freedom.

Mobile phones in North Korea will, over time, filter out to the mainstream through the enormous gray market that operates out of sight of the Loudspeaker. In time, business people and wealthy families will gain access and with it the youth will be opened up to new ideas. Once this happens, the genie is out of the bottle.

• DPRK allows foreign mobile phones (BBC)
• Cell phones and IT in North Korea (Eurasia review)

Anthropology is the science of humanity. Through anthropology we can better understand what it is to be human, particularly through the language, tools and rituals of our daily behavior.

Let’s look at those behaviors in the context of Instagram – the photo sharing app for your mobile phone that Facebook recently bought for $1 billion.

Photo Sharing since 2001

Mobile photo sharing has been around a long time. My first experience of photo sharing was “Sha-Meru” in Japan on the J-Phone service made popular by those timeless Japanese High School girls I wrote about in the book “The Mobile Youth“. The technology has been in place for over 10 years now but it’s not until the technology matches the behaviors do we see disruptive advances like Instagram. Pre-instagram, the world was inhabited by many apps and services that aimed to bend our behaviors to suit the technologies, not vice-versa.

So, why’s Instagram popular?

I put it down to 3 social factors:

1. Emotion vs Logic: We buy on emotion and justify with logic. Store “sales” remind us of this fact. We want something but need an offer or discount to make us feel our behavior had a rational motive e.g. “I just saved $100″. If we all behaved logically, nobody would smoke. Why would you use a product that killed you? The fact is that emotion is the key driver of our behavior and Instagram appeals directly to this prime mover. Emotion is triggered by the visual format. Advertising, for example, draws heavily from imagery appealing to our emotional core as opposed to logical understanding. The act of snapping a photo and uploading a moment, feeling or experience is the simplest way of sharing emotions.
2. Passive vs Active Communication: 90% of communication is passive. For many years, tech companies have marketed photo sharing apps along the lines of “hey look at me at this concert” and other cool moments that are a generally rarity in daily life. These photos do exist but the reality is that most of what people share on instagram is very mundane – pictures of lunch, pictures of nail make-overs, hair, working out and so on. Being mundane, however, doesn’t make them any less valuable, it’s simply making up for that chunk of non-verbal communication we’re used to interacting with in person. Animal behaviorists call it “phatic communication” just like gorillas sitting in their communal groups grooming each other. From the logical aspect it makes no sense, but socially it’s an extremely important shared activity.
3. The Interest Economy: The Interest Economy is the long tail of identity. Gone are the days when you had to be part of the Pepsi Generation. Gone are the days when MTV presented you with the option of being “mainstream” or “alternative”. Instagram lets you connect with people just like you around the world. You could be into comics, triathlon, makeup or One Direction. Now you don’t have to be alone to be yourself. Where Instagram gets it right that other social networking apps fail is that unlike Google +, people don’t necessarily want to connect across all their platforms. People don’t necessarily want to message each other privately. People don’t necessarily want to meet up all the time. It’s okay simply to receive social proof from likeminded people without having to meet them in real life. Meeting may be a bonus but it’s not the goal of the game, feeling a sense of belonging and significance is.

Food on Instagram

A typical instagram photo of food

Think about these in the context of food, one of the most readily shared photos on instagram.

• Food is an emotional activity. We see, feel, touch and taste food. We are attracted to food emotionally as opposed to logically.
• Food is a passive activity. We are happiest when we eat collectively. Often we share food passively by simply being in the same room together. The act of “being” together is the main activity.
• Food is an interest economy in itself. Back in the era of advertising and 1989, there wasn’t much choice in food identities. Now on instagram you can choose whatever Interest Economy you subscribe to: paleo, vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, sushi snob, cupcake hobbyist, coffee connoisseur and so on. If you’re into the Paleo diet, you now don’t need to compromise your beliefs just because of your geography. The chances are that similar likeminded people with shared passions don’t exist in your neighborhood, workplace or school but they’re only a click away on Instagram.

Too often we wax lyrical about “Social Media” but forget that all media is social.

The word “media” derives from the Latin “medius” meaning central, or between. Media exists as a means to transfer information between people. Media back in 1989, in the era of MTV Madonna and Pepsi, had the schoolyards buzzing the next day in the same way “social” media buzzes about the Kardashians or LeBron James.

So, it’s easy for us to compartmentalize “social” as an aspect of media, an adjunct to our overall marketing strategy as opposed to considering it as the defining raison d’etre of our organization.

What companies do is exist to connect customers, all else is detail. As long as we continue to use terms like “social media” we continue to reinforce the idea that there is business and then there is the fluffy “social” stuff that we add on to that business, but we haven’t yet worked out how to use it properly yet.

In the book, All is Social, I wrote about our Social Code and how we are social by design. Organizations either build walls to contain our social behavior or they build bridges to facilitate it.

32 people died when the Captain ran the Costa Concordia aground

‘I regret nothing:’ Costa Concordia captain says he understands why people ‘hate’ him but other officers should share the blame, reported newspaper the Daily Mail, one year on from that fateful evening.

The holiday vessel Concordia slammed into rocks off the Italian island of Giglio last year after Captain Francesco Schettino took it off its pre-programmed course and brought it closer to land as a favour to friends from the island.

Schettino say he understands why some people ‘hate’ him, but defended his actions and blamed others on the bridge for failing to inform him of the situation in time, and then of botching his orders once he tried to steer clear of the reef. 

Schettino who is accused of multiple manslaughter, causing the wreck and abandoning ship, said in an interview with NBC News he tried to make sure he was the last person to leave the ship.

When the Costa Concordia was noticably in peril, Captain Schettino was rumored to have continued his dinner and finished dessert. While crew pushed past women with small children to commandeer their own getaways on the ship’s lifeboats, Schettino calmly finished his tiramisu, instructed his subordinates to prepare an escape craft and, without notice, abandoned ship.

According to newspaper records and interviews, the Italian coast guard repeatedly ordered Schettino back to the Concordia, threatening him with numerous repercussions should he abandon the vessel. But, the threats were in vain. Schettino reached Giglio, hailed a taxi to temporary accommodation and let the crew and passengers fend for themselves.

What often appears to be an incredible lack of empathy with the needs of those around them is more a systemic rather than personality failure of the individuals involved. Schettino operated from the bridge and dined privately. The omnipotence of the ship’s captain is legendary. In the age of great exploration when vessels plied the vast oceans in search of booty or new lands, the risks were exceptionally high. Crew were often pressganged or orphaned individuals who had neither the education, class nor equipment to make decisions an act authoritatively. The infallibility of the Captain is embedded in an authority gradient that is as visible in the interactions between crew as it is in the physical distance that separates the bridge from the engine room.

Concordia captain Schettino remains in complete denial

Schettino isn’t unique. In fact, it’s all to common to hear about a CEO, banker or politician who resigns in a whirlwind of controversy but with little or no regret. Organizations create walls that breed out empathy. When the captain dines alone, becomes infallible and when the underlings are unable to challenge their authority, the captain fails to empathize with the plight of others. Decisions are made that are self-serving, worldviews created that isolate him from the outside.

These failings are cultural – the product of decisions and people behind them that promote isolate, the building of walls and the decline of empathy.

Saudi Arabia, like all closed societies, fascinates me.

Here you have an autocratic introspective state based on medieval laws existing in the digital age.
Naturally you have tension and naturally you’ll have change agents, the youth, who will fuel that tension.

Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Tower

In the book, The Mobile Youth, I wrote about Saudi youth and mobile phones. Few have experienced the nature of Saudi life for teens so it was a challenge developing leads and background for this story. I focused my efforts on the few contacts I had, personal experience and the inside, and often secretive, stories of the youth who live there.

The following BBC documentary gives a flavour of life in the Kingdom, albeit from a perspective purposefully spun by the regime’s PR. And while the documentary is keen to show a warm, relaxed, open society laughing around the camp fire, the reality for teens who don’t live the privileged life of a Saudi royal is very different.

In the book, I tried to capture many of the fascinating real life stories from the Kingdom, in particular the challenges facing youth and dating. For most young Saudis, just because dating is frowned upon and severely controlled, doesn’t mean it’s out of bounds. In fact, many of the extents to which Saudis will use mobile phones for dating (from throwing phones with preloaded numbers at a car full of girls to randomly dialling numbers to chat to strangers) are sheer testament to the Social Code and our will to connect.

In many of the scenarios I’ve covered in my anthropological study of youth and mobile phones one factor remains true – the mobile phones is the primary tool available to youth today to reclaim the social connectivity denied of them by the forces that shape society. That’s why many can’t live without their phones.

Control is the mother of efficiency. And to achieve efficiency you have to eliminate relationships. Where autocratic regimes (be they Saudi monarchs, out of control brands or parents!) deny connectivity, youth innovate ways to reclaim that birth right, that social space and the mobile phone is the defacto tool to redress the balance.

Empathy from the Greek πάθος (pathos): “passion” or “suffering”.

When consultants push “Big Data“, they push more insight, more logic, more research. Yet, when it comes to the prime mover behind our behaviours, it’s never logic that determines our outcome. It’s always emotion.

More data, more insight cannot solve the problem. What we need is more empathy.

If we are to truly understand we need to empathize with the passions and suffering of the people we serve.

If that means making better mobile phones it means understanding the role of the Interest Economy or the Disconnected Generation as highlighted in my book “The Mobile Youth“.

We have all the data we need. In fact, too much. What we need to do is break down the walls that prevent our people doing the things they do naturally – empathy.