A factoid is commonly used to mean any sort of brief, concise piece of news or information, supposedly because "trivia" is too on the nose. Its practical definition is a little more ominous, that its a piece of speculation or unfounded assertion that gets repeated and spread around so much its simply taken as fact despite a lack of authentication.
My favorite example is a piece of information that goes something like this, "We only remember 40% of what we hear, 30% of what we read, 60% of what we see..." and so on and so on, the overall lesson or advice being that teachers and educators should engage with their students on a more "visually interesting" level. In fact, I first heard this string of statistics in a Powerpoint class. The truth is there's absolutely nothing to back up these statistics. Trying to find anything resembling a source is akin to tracking the origin of that joke you heard that one time from that one coworker or neighbor who seems to pull such things from the air itself.
While writing an entry about feature creep in our tiny pocket computers (that just so happen to have tiny telephones in them somewhere) we're all hopelessly addicted to, I remembered something I thought I'd heard somewhere that I used to tell people back when I worked for a cell carrier. I worked in that customer service job from around 2006-2008. By the time I was "promoted to customer" the iPhone was still firmly in the grasp of AT&T, one of the most significant events in the history of telecommunications since the birth of the Baby Bells or the launch of Telstar 1. Google had been developing Android for years prior, but this one insignificant marketing tactic was the chocolate to their peanut butter. Still, smartphones, however accessible Apple had set out to make them, were still extremely niche at this point. Our bestselling phone was the Motorola Razr. We were on the verge of introducing unlimited minutes as a widespread offering, and unless you got a special little add-on bundle to your bill, every single text and picture message you sent and received would cost you. To be nickeled and dimed on this would have been an improvement as the real cost was closer to a quarter a pop. We offered various tiers, a few hundred for a few dollars, a thousand for a few dollars more, and unlimited for a fistful of dollars.
A common story I'd often hear from customers, especially parents with kids old enough to be trusted with their own lines, was how they first grumbled and groaned at texting, calling it a step back and the like. Given the Razr, along with most phones that we weren't calling "dumb" yet, only had a standard telephone keypad with which to write out your 140-ish character message, it's understandable. T9 and other types of predictive text systems were fair (some almost looked forward to see what goofs and typos it would come up with), but hardly practical. Strangely, despite this, the usage of texting kept going up, and those parents who had rolled their eyes and even shaken their fists at the idea of having any texting on their plans were almost happy to have to upgrade to the full unlimited plan. Sure, nobody liked paying more for something already fairly pricey, but at the very least the appeal was recognized, if not fully embraced.
This did not surprise me, and not simply because of my own addictive personality and a lifetime of clicking buttons to make things happen on a screen. It didn't surprise me because I had heard somewhere, from someone, at some point, about how Nokia, that Finnish phone maker some people still think is Japanese most likely because John Turtoro made a bad career move for a big paycheck and semi-steady work, had proven there was almost an inherent need for texting in a social structure.
The story goes like this: Nokia hand-picked a small, tightly-knit local village near their main offices for a grand experiment. Everyone in town was issued a cell phone and given a fairly reasonable plan to go along with it. There was a catch, however. The phones could only send and receive text messages. All voice functionality was disabled at the software level. Landlines were also disabled as part of the deal. That reasonable plan was for unlimited texting, so there was no penalty whatsoever for being able to send and receive hundreds or thousands of text messages throughout the month. Naturally, there was much grumbling and groaning, eye rolls, and possibly one or two shaken fists, but I suppose nobody had anything better to do because nobody opted out and the rest of the experiment went off without a hitch.
At the end of the month, Nokia send out a notification to all users that the voice features would be turned back on, landlines would be restored, and as a bonus everyone could keep the phones for another month before they had to find carriers to get plans through. The final twist to the story, if it can be called that, is that although the ability to make and receive voice calls was back in business, the usage of texting had not changed in the slightest. In tracking people's usage of the texting feature (how many per day, to whom, etc.) went up within the first week, and stayed there. There may have been a slight decline when the voice functionality came back, but there was no great exchange or abandonment. Nokia had effectively proven that texting was not a novelty that would come and go, but was in fact here to stay.
This next part may shock you, but I have found absolutely no truth to this anecdote. It's possible I'm missing something. Maybe the story has simply faded into the background radiation of the web. More likely, the story is semi-true, that a group of people were offered texting plans at no added charge, their habits monitored for a short time, and the data still showing that as it was available to them and didn't carry any added cost (or a nominal one at best) it proved itself useful, practical, and possibly even a necessity. Focus groups aren't anything extraordinary, and neither are public betas.
Just as the "factoid" about information retention is meant to encourage teachers and educators to be more creative and hands-on with their students (therefore the lack of credibility to the story is tacitly forgiven because it does more good than harm, so the reasoning may go), the takeaway from this story about Nokia and texting is that people don't know what they want. The common scenario is people will ask for X, but their real desire is for Y. For example, people in a survey may insist they prefer a rich, dark roast to their coffee, but a cursory glance at their spending habits shows a preference for milky, weak brews loaded with cream and sugar. There's no deception, simply a disconnect between expectations and reality. The opposite of this scenario is that people will insist to never indulging X, preferring Y over it every single time, only to practically forget about Y once X is readily available and easily accessible. People would moan about texting, calling it useless or even mocking it as primitive, only to wind up using it more than their voice.
It's almost ironic that we've gone back to writing letters to each other. How much daylight is there between sending someone a brief text message and sending a telegram? The only real difference is there's no longer a middle man.
When we first got e-mail in our home, the few people I knew who had e-mail addresses (which is a social phenomenon worthy of its own entry someday) often read like fully hand-written letters, lengthy and detailed, as though we were secretly afraid that our teachers were going to look over our shoulders and slap a grade on it. In time, we learned we didn't have to be brief. Next thing we knew, we were e-mailing our cousins thusly:
"When's the Packer game?"
"4:30 our time."
"Cool."
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