Chapter Six

Sustainable Communication?

Can we have too much communication? This chapter looks at the issue. Is it possible for us to deal with the amount of messages we receive and send out, without sacrificing some other activities such as thought? Spam is a clear sign that the opportunities afforded by digital for more and better communication can easily be subverted to more and worse. We can also see that we are all spammers now, and organisations are struggling to deal elegantly with the consequences. It leads in fact directly to a worsening of service.

In the personal sphere, it is also ironic that ease of communication seems in many cases to be endangering relationships, as we look at evidence that the new technologies make a range of illicit behaviours easier than ever before. And even sleep is under subtle attack.

It’s good to talk?

Sustainable communication sounds suspiciously like two buzz words, awkwardly coupled together like trains from a different railway gauge.

Sustainable is a word we are hearing a great deal of now. What does it mean? According to Fritjof Capra¹, the concept was introduced in the 1980s by Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute. He defined a sustainable society as one that is able to satisfy its needs without diminishing the chances of later generations. In other words, we should not take out of life more than we put back in. Global warming, the eradication of species, loss of bio-diversity – all these indicators are telling us that we are living unsustainably on our planet. This basic model is being applied to many areas of life: business, architecture, farming and fishing to name the most prominent.

Can it apply to communications too? To be fair – it sounds initially like a stretch. I thought of making it the title of this book, but after a discussion with friends and colleagues, abandoned this notion on the basis that the word is both over-used and poorly understood.

However, it is a useful approach to consider modern communication and technology through the lens of sustainability. Firstly because it is a model that is being used more and more across society for evaluating our actions and their consequences. The communications industry (in its widest sense including IT, media, telecoms and marketing) will become seriously out of step if it does not align thinking with trends elsewhere.

Secondly because asking some questions – like what kinds of communication may be unsustainable and why – may generate insights and answers we need to take on board.

Litter louts exist online too

Not surprisingly spam is the first candidate for consideration.

I have an e-mail address I use for everything that isn’t work or friends. It’s on Hotmail, and I give it out to all kinds of organisations via paper forms and on web sites. In the last few years, like many other people, I have been deluged with spam. In a typical 24 hours the following arrives unsolicited in my inbox (among some stuff I did want).

Kara promises me three inches more and 30% extra width. Aimee offers a brunette teen str!pping down (note the use of the exclamation to avoid spam filters). Julian.n.chad says I can lose weight in the shower! Apparently it involves cider which sounds fun but unbelievable. No more feelings of embarressment (sic) tempts me with increasing my bra cup size. Ted has Viagra for sale. Walter Williams writes from Nigeria to offer me the opportunity to have $35m US transferred into my bank account: all I have to do is give him the details! Ask Us How To offers increased energy, weight loss, reduced wrinkles, And Much More!

This is pretty typical. Sadly for the purveyors of these delights, I’m interested in buying none of them, though it might be fun to try Viagra one day (but not from Ted I think). Their business models are very sustainable – it costs next to nothing to send an e-mail – and the abundance of spam suggests that it works for certain categories of product and service: specifically sex, pharmaceuticals, personal health issues such as dieting, conmen and financial services (some of these vendors may be the same organisations) .

In a paper – “Spam The Current State” – published in August 2003, Andrew Leung of Telus Corporation offers an excellent analysis. According to Andrew approximately 40% of all e-mail on the Internet is spam. It’s growing too – spam was up fivefold over the previous 18 months. The reasons are not hard to see: it’s easy and cheap to set up and run (you only need a PC and an Internet connection). Spammers only get a response rate of 0.005%: that is 50 out of one million people, but they can make money on less than that so cheap is it to buy lists. Leung quotes a price of $150 for 70 million e-mail addresses on a CD. With the 1 in 20,000 response rate quoted above that’s 3,500 new suckers. If the product in question costs $50 (the youth elixir I was offered today came in at that price per bottle), that is revenue of $175,000. Assuming a profit margin of 40%, the spammer makes $70,000. Not bad for $150 and a few key strokes.

Spammers are very sophisticated, and I don’t mean that they read Proust in the original or know whether ‘99 or 2000 is a better year for Burgundy. Among their tactics they “harvest” e-mail addresses with programs which bombard Internet service providers (for instance AOL or Hotmail) with guessed e-mail addresses like mark.curtis63@xyz.com. A response is added to their database. The cost of doing this declines all the time.

Spam, as many people are now discovering, has also come to mobiles. A friend went on a train journey recently. Short of things to occupy his mind, he entered a competition on a can of Pepsi. As is now standard with on-pack sales promotions run by products with a youth bias, the entry mechanic involved mobile texting. On the face of it, this is more fun for the consumer (instant no hassle entry). And it is much better for the promoting company. Not only does someone get to keep a percentage of the margin generated by the text (often the sales promotion agency), but now they know your number too and have a mainline into your life.

This particular competition offered Tom – my friend – the “opportunity” to win one of 400 places at a Ms Dynamite concert. When they asked him his age (42) it became apparent to him that he was unlikely to be a winner of the big ticket item. So it proved. Still, he did get the consolation prize of a ringtone delivered to his phone, seconds later. Actually he lost the ringtone when he tried to save it – which is probably a good thing as I doubt Ms Dynamite would have gone down well at the very straight oil company he works at.

A couple of days later, he got an unrequested text offering him the opportunity to meet “young singles” in his area. Now because Tom only uses his mobile for work, and has never given out the number to any source outside friends and colleagues, he thinks the Pepsi promotion is the source of the leak. He can’t be sure, and probably will never know. It seems unlikely that Pepsi would have sold his details to a dating company, but perhaps there were other agents in the chain who were less scrupulous.

At its wildest fringes this is not a nice business. Here’s another typical, and real, message received unsolicited.

“From: URGENT! Your Mobile No. was awarded £1500 Bonus Caller Prize on 1/8/03. This is our final try to contact U! Call from Landline 090 6636 9547 BOX97LDNW7QP, 150PPM”

Notice the sting in the tail: following an apparently meaningless series of numbers and letters is 150PPM, which translates as £1.50 per minute. In other words, we will keep you on line for as long as we can and that’ll be £15 if we get you to 10 minutes. The numbers in this business are interesting – it probably cost 6p to send that text. If only 1 in a 100 people respond, and stay on line for 5 minutes, then total cost = £6, total revenue = £7.5. So someone makes a profit of £1.50 per 100 sent out (not including any other costs and maybe the occasional prize). Which is only £7,500 for every 500,000 numbers. But telephone number lists are more expensive than their e-mail equivalents. So you wonder if it is worth the game – or if response rates are actually much higher than 1%. Perhaps some other scam is in there too to fleece those truly dumb enough to persist on the line. It also seems sadly probable that those least likely to be able to afford the calls will be the most likely to respond, like lottery tickets.

So right now there seem to be two prevalent mobile spam models offering either sex or free prizes (surely someone will combine both shortly). There are also two big problems with this: intrusion, and suggestion – or the digital honey trap.

The mobile phone is the most personal technology device yet invented. That’s why the ringtone and icon business has exploded: these ultra cheap downloadables let consumers customise their phones to tell the world who they are in a pathetic squeaky sort of way. So spam on a phone is even more intrusive than in your e-mail inbox. For a lot of people, a text arriving is an event (who is it? what’s inside?), which reinforces their sense of identity (someone wants me). It’s more than a little disappointing to discover that you’re wanted by some scuzzball with a nice line in scam.

Tom is happily married and has deleted the text. Nonetheless, how many people, in or out of relationships, respond to the suggestive type of message? Someone out there wants you! Here’s the highway to find them!…(at 25p or more per text). Suggestive on its own is fine and is all around us in the media. But on phones and in e-mail the sheer level of repetition undoubtedly tempts in a way that humans have not been exposed to before.

Spam Reversal

In an ironic twist, the very organisations who have over-used communications technology in the past are now struggling to cope with the volume of incoming fire.

Seventeen years ago I applied for my first mortgage. Working at the time in Soho, my first port of call was my bank branch on Oxford Street, London. I had to fix an interview with the manager. He wore a suit and so did I. I went in as a supplicant and probably sat with hands folded on my lap. Everything was going swimmingly until I revealed that I was about to become a father. His face went grim. I got a lecture on the unlikelihood of mothers returning to work, no matter what they might say before the baby arrived. As our income base had just irretrievably halved in his view, we could not have the mortgage. In Thatcher’s Britain it was critical to get your feet on a rung of the property ladder. It was not the brightest moment of my life.

I’m sure banks still refuse mortgages. But many other aspects of the experience would be unrecognisable to today’s 25 year old. Especially the notion that you should go somewhere and talk to someone. It may not even be clear whom you should talk to. It’s a better world in some ways: there is much fiercer competition to lend money and many more ways to find and secure a good deal, especially through web intermediaries. Money Supermarket will show you pages of deals from different suppliers with just a few clicks.

Going to a branch was a much more considered process. It took time to get there, nerve to sit in front of the manager, thought to communicate what you wanted. You did not do this easily or lightly. You also generally only got one choice of product. But it cost the banks time too, so they wanted to deal with you more efficiently and technology – initially the telephone – offered an attractive route.

In striving to make the process more convenient for customers, and “efficient” (read lower cost) for themselves, the financial services providers inadvertently reduced the amount of consideration required by a customer before they made contact. They are now having massive difficulty dealing with the consequences.

Steve Lloyd of Logica CMG, an IT company which (among other things) helps banks figure out what to do about it, says it is going to get worse as the generation accustomed to texting spontaneously become customers. Already the number of calls and e-mails are spiralling out of control with no extra business resulting. A typical bank may get 2.5 million phone calls a month, compared with pretty much none in the 1980s except local branch traffic. It’s like reverse spam.

What do you do with spam? You filter it. This is exactly what the new breed of automated phone systems (also known as IVR) are designed to do. The companies that use these are well aware that they drive customers mad (welcome to Deafco! In order for us to be able to handle your call better, please listen to your choices – if you are enquiring about sales please press 1, etc…) They know they lose calls while you go into the endless loop of being told what a valuable customer you are, but are prepared to pay the price if they can fend off “valuable” customers with a touchtone response. According to Steve, one well known telecoms company in the UK forces customers to go through 70 key impressions on their phone just to top up a pay as you go account.

My colleague Olof and his girlfriend recently moved house. They needed to interact with the gas utility, a broadband provider, a mortgage company, two kinds of insurance company (buildings and contents), the water utility, a new gym and lawyers. Not one of them provided a satisfactory experience, which is unsurprising but if you think about it a shocking statistic. He says that they now trust organisations to get things wrong, not right.

What has changed here is the nature of conversation. Actually it barely passes muster as a dialogue. The process has been chunked down to bits, bytes and grunts. Using the Internet you can launch multiple enquiries and focus them precisely – just tell me your interest rate – without engaging in a full discussion.

It makes it very hard for a company to have a single view of you, the customer, if you persist in sending signals via phone, branch, ATM, mobile, web, interactive TV and post. The holy grail of customer relationship management (CRM) is known as the single customer view. This is where every single bit of the company knows all the things about you that the other bits know. But very few organisations have achieved this, and meanwhile they continue to throw money at CRM software “solutions”. Sadly the aim of (the very misnamed) CRM is to enable the organisation to “cross sell” (persuade you to buy insurance when you have a bank account) or “up sell” (persuade you to spend more on the same service). Would you want a “relationship” with someone who is always and only intent on cross or up selling you? Somebody will eventually make a fortune persuading companies to reverse the whole idea: that software should allow the customer to manage the relationship to their satisfaction, not the other way round.

Commercial conversations have become fragmented, by time and channels. This is both a symptom and a cause of a decline in trust. For many people, perhaps like me with a legacy of patronising bank manager stories, the boot is now on the other foot. They don’t trust companies not to rip them off, and therefore don’t want a conversational relationship. Yet the more companies also fend them off, unable to cope with the volume of fragmented enquiries, the less time trust has to develop through conversation.

Once again we see that digital is stripping out context. Transactions are stripped down to their raw components and what is lost is mutual understanding. As usual we are both winners and losers. Consumers are “empowered” – to use the current terminology – with greater choice. But try telling that to the punter who has been hanging on the telephone for 30 minutes trying to navigate a “self-help” maze.

Eventually of course, many people do get through to call centres. Is it so surprising then that the other biggest problem organisations face apart from soaring numbers of calls is high staff turn over in call centres? In some it is reported to be over 30% per annum, with all the entailed costs of training new staff and de-commissioning leavers. Overall numbers are huge: a UK bank may have over 8,000 call centre staff. Demoralised agents, often recruited in geographical areas where wage costs are low, struggle to field efficiently (often irate) customers with a wide variety of questions, and a different context behind each and every call. The latest trend is to shift call centres to developing countries…I’d love to know how they impart the context of the bloke in Acacia Avenue, Warrington to staff in Bangalore. But staff attrition (as it is charmingly called) is up to 25% already in India.

Yet quite reasonably, don’t you expect an organisation to remember what you’ve told them before? And do they? This may be the most infuriating aspect of all – the apparent lack of listening.² It’s a skill which forms 50% of a good conversation. Without it we are just voices, yelling in the wilderness. In the digital age, companies need to learn not just to listen attentively, but demonstrate that they have too.

Is this picture of a world of spam and fragmented conversations sustainable? On three counts it is not. Firstly the Internet and mobile phones have brought with them many benefits to mankind. But spam devalues communication through these channels. It takes longer to find things that are relevant. The messages themselves become less compelling, and the important ones tainted by association with dodgy hair replacement therapy. Bit by bit, the barriers go up. So if the result is that we use the technologies less for the things they are good for, we all lose. Leung makes the point repeatedly that “marketers are not aware of the social or real total costs of their actions. Due to their nonchalant attitude, they will reply to any consumer complaints by repeating the same mantra: ‘If you don’t like an e-mail, just delete it’

Secondly spam imposes expenses – chiefly in lost time – on individuals and business. In January 2003 Yahoo reported an estimate for this as $13.4 billion for US and European businesses. Other analyses quoted by Leung suggest a figure of €10 billion for Europe alone.

The UK government has just banned spam. It’s a good and needed step, undermined by the fact that most spam comes from outside the UK.

It’s harder to know what legislation can prevent the third sustainability issue: that the online environment is increasingly being blamed for the break-up of relationships. Divorce Online³ reports that half of all divorce petitions it processes involve Internet adultery and cybersex behaviour. Relate claim that 10% of couples that seek its help cite the Internet as the third party causing problems. I went to Divorce Online (a “self help and information service for England and Wales”), and entered the key words “cybersex” into the search engine (I had picked up the story elsewhere and was looking for the source). The results of the search – presented on Divorce Online itself were, with supreme irony:

1. Cybersex: UK’s most extreme HARDCORE – no credit cards – click here!

2. The biggest cybersex site: the world’s hottest porn site featuring etc…

3. Cybersex – UK only! Etc…

Scrolling down the page I found the news article I had come for. Of course I’m not suggesting that this web site deliberately lists porn sites among self-help tips on divorce. I’m sure they have very good legal advice. Their search engine just dumbly returns what it finds across the Internet.

Quoted in the Register⁴, J Lindsey Short Jr of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers said: “the computer is a great communications device. But spouses need to remember to communicate with each other as well…While I don’t think you can say that the Internet is causing more divorces, it does make it easier to engage in the sort of behaviours that traditionally lead to divorce.”

Perhaps because mobiles are less prevalent in the US than Europe, Mr Short sticks with the PC. But in Italy they have adopted cell phones with gusto, for all areas of their life. The BBC reported⁵ that “ a new survey published by Italy’s largest private investigation company says that in nearly 90% of cases, it is the mobile phone that reveals or betrays extra marital activities…Beatrice Ruggiero, a divorce lawyer in Rome, says…’I’ve noticed perhaps 30% more divorces in September and October than last year…and lots of my clients are saying they discovered their partner’s infidelities during the summer holidays because of SMS messages sent on mobiles’. Apparently one of the mobile phone operators is planning to introduce a dual sim card, which would have the effect of making discovery harder. One Italian private investigator has published “The Five Golden Rules” on how to not get found out.

While it is charmingly Italian to focus on the problems of discovery, the issue would not arise if the mobile did not lend itself so well to creating the problems in the first place. Of course infidelity existed long before digital technology. But as American lawyers and Italian private eyes know, it makes it a lot easier.

Even divorce has been carried out by text. An Islamic court in Malaysia has approved a divorce that had been notified to one half of the couple via SMS. After a quarrel, the husband sent the following text, “If you do not leave your parents’ house, you will be divorced.” Gulf News has reported that SMS messages have been cited as reasons for divorce in at least 15 other cases. Malaysia’s civil government is in the process of banning divorce via text message.

There is a serious question here: are we happy to continue to facilitate communications structures which undermine relationships so easily? 

Someone is out there 4 you

Of course, not all digital flirting is adulterous or damaging. The dating market has seen tremendous growth since the Internet took off in the early 1990s. Even before then the dating market has always been a big market because dating is an essential part of our lifestyles and will always be.

Online (web-based) dating is a big winner of the last few years. In spring 2001 a Canadian report backed by MSN and written by academics from the university of Toronto found that 1.1 – 1.2 million Canadians had visited an online dating site, and the potential for online dating services was a further 2.5 to 2.8 million adults (this was dating not flirting). This equates roughly to a 19% of adult population market size. They saw 4 forces driving this:

• a growing proportion of the population composed of singles

• career and time pressures increasing, so people look for more efficient ways of finding partners

• single people more mobile because of job marketplace changes, so harder to find partners

• workplace romance on decline because of sexual harassment sensitivities, also online dating “seems to be safer than conventional dating”
  

According to comScore Media Metrix, more than 45 million Americans visited online dating sites in May 2003, up from about 35 million in December 2002. The Online Publishers Association projected that spending on Internet dating sites in 2003 would be $100 million or more per quarter, compared to less than $10 million a quarter at the beginning of 2001. The New York Times is forecasting a $400 million market for online personals in 2004.

The OPA/comScore Networks report claims that individuals who pay for personals content are likely to spend both more time and more money online. Whereas the average Internet user spent 6,143 minutes online and $83 in e-commerce purchases during the first quarter of 2003, the average personals content purchaser racked up 13,895 minutes and $238.72 online.

Meetic, a French company, is active in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Great Britain and Belgium and has already “seduced” 1.5 million web users. Datingdirect.com in the UK claims over a million users.

Flirting is already a prime use of SMS.

Although the above statement is known anecdotally, figures are now beginning to back it up.

• Over 2/3rds of European phone users regularly use SMS (Forrester Research)

• Dutch SMS traffic went up by 45% on Valentine’s day in 2002 (Europmedia.net)

• 24% of Europeans claim to have engaged in “txt sex” (Phillips)

• Germans and British are most likely to send romantic messages.

• Italians and Spanish are most likely to use phone for love affairs.

• In Asia half of mobile phone owners feel it is easier to SMS somebody they are attracted to than to actually speak to them (Siemens)

Recent surveys now show that mobile dating services in South Korea (a large mobile data market) have seen very strong growth in the last few months. Specific mobile dating services are now growing – mainly based on SMS or WAP. Taiwanese cellco Far EasTone claims that one of the most successful applications on its multimedia portal, Bravo, is a dating game in which players interact via avatars. Almost 30% of the carrier’s active GPRS users subscribe to the service, says FET president Jan Nilsson. Track Ur Mate has become the most profitable value-added service of leading Indian carrier Airtel. It has 65,000 paid requests per day, according to Sandy Argawal, Landmat’s Asia-Pacific managing director.

Match.com went mobile with AT&T Wireless in 1Q02. Anecdotally take-up figures began to rise in June, when MMS was incorporated into the service, enabling users to message photos of each other. AT&T Wireless will confirm the claims, but say the service is “doing very well.”

Meanwhile one service (for the terminally insecure) has sprung up on the web offering software which tracks if the e-mail you sent has been opened, how long it remained open for, if it was reopened and forwarded.⁶

Behind all of these examples drawn from different corners of the communications world, we have to ask is it sustainable to be “always on?”. The answer already looks a lot like no. On 17 September 2003 the online IT newsletter the Register gave the headline “Mobile phones disrupt teenagers sleep”. A lot of teenagers leave their phone on at night. The details came as no surprise – a study conducted by the University of Leuven in Belgium, published in the Journal of Sleep Research, claims that the noise of text messages arriving in the middle of the night was affecting the sleep quality of almost half of 16 year olds. Presumably these messages are coming from other teenagers who have also been woken up by the siren bleep of incoming SMS, in a kind of viral consecutive disruption. Even among 13 year olds the figures for woken over once a week were over 13% .

I know its true because, with two teenage daughters, I’ve heard it happening, and been woken by it too. Interestingly the howls of protest when as a parent you suggest that mobiles are switched off at bedtime are rooted in their concept of “rights”. It’s their right to be always on, apparently. But when it messes with their ability to function as amiable humans the next day, I’d suggest something unsustainable is going on.

It is well documented that business people have discovered something similar in the last 10 years. Technology brings the office to them, and if they are unfortunate enough to be workaholic (unable to place their private life first) then e-mail and mobiles are first-rate tools for prioritising the company. It’s a relationship killer, and for many people therefore unsustainable.

A reasonable counter-argument to this is that it is the choice of the individual to use technology in the way they see fit. Just because you have sharp knives in the kitchen does not mean you are going to stab yourself with them. This is the “technology is neutral” standpoint. It may be in intent, but is often not in consequence. Sometimes it is not even so in intent: a handgun has only one real end use in mind – to shoot other human beings – hardly the hallmark of a morally neutral device. The expectations of our peers and reinforcement by the media of what constitutes behaviour to aspire to, mean that we do not operate entirely in a world of free will. That is not an excuse for abuse, merely an observation that we have to address the issues of unsustainable communications, which literally ruin lives.

Return to the question posed at the beginning – can we have too much communication? Surely we have been encouraged to believe that the more we talk, the better the world will be? But it seems to me that this is based on the face–to-face model. If we follow the path of increased distraction over 5, 10, 50, 100 years, where will it take us? What will evolve? How will we adapt? Answers to these questions are likely to be largely wrong, because we cannot escape the context of now, and truly see what standing in the future looks like. We might usefully ask instead, are we equipped to deal with the new levels of communication? This question in turn leads us to examine our use of time.