Is SMS Usage Tied to Culture?
By Will Radecki in the Dominican Republic
I read with amazement this week that in Uganda, text messaging accounted for $39 million in revenues over the last two years. Ugandans sent 354 million SMS messages in 2008. It’s no surprise that SMS is popular in Africa. What’s surprising is that I’ve been living in the Dominican Republic for almost a year and haven’t seen anyone send a text message.
What is the determining factor for the widespread use of text messaging? Some might say income – Ugandans send text messages instead of make voice calls to save a few shillings – but this wouldn’t explain the 1.3 billion text messages sent daily in the US. Others might say reliability. Voice calls are dropped so regularly in some developing countries it’s just easier to write and send the whole message. And a colleague suggested it may be the ratio of voice to text prices. Where the ratio is higher, the more likely people substitute text for talk.
But I wonder if there is any research out there on the cultural affinity for texting. When I ask Dominican friends why they don’t send text messages, they just laugh and say, “When I want to tell people something I just call them.” Reliable data on a cultural preference for voice over text (or for any mobile phone function over another) would be valuable indeed for operators. It could help guide a number of company decisions on anything from marketing efforts, service offerings to network infrastructure investments.
May 6th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Interesting observation. I wonder if Latin America has lower text rates overall because of the important of person-to-person interaction. The abruptness of text messaging can be seen as rude. However, most cultures in Africa place a lot of importance on human connections and still texting has taken off. I wonder if it’s a tipping point when necessity and efficiency outweigh nicety that helps texting take off.
May 7th, 2009 at 11:17 am
I am quite surprised that folks in your area are not using SMS!! It’s quite a different story here in Costa Rica where people text just to say “hi” or tell a joke. In fact, Costa Ricans can even text and drive without taking their headphones off!
May 7th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Also, I think generally operators publish data about SMS traffic, data revenues and the SMS portion of those data revenues. If you can get aggregated operator data by country or region, it can tell you a lot about “cultural preferences” for SMS. For instance, I saw a chart where Asia-Pacific appears to be blowing other regions out of the water in terms of texting on a per-subscriber basis.