CD Voice | Content is king in the new world order
It was a sight I thought I would never see on a Beijing subway train -- a person without being hooked to a cellphone!
What went wrong, I wondered as I glanced around at other passengers glued to their mobile devices.
One man grinned, then grimaced, and then grinned again as he switched between screens showing share fluctuations.
A woman watched what I thought was a recorded reality show, using a faulty earpiece and annoying the old man sitting next to her, who was playing a game.
Another took a break from reading something online to use the shiny backside of her cellphone as a makeshift mirror, applying lip gloss. Her station is approaching, I thought.
No one was reading a book, magazine or newspaper.
Meanwhile, a lady walked in from the front car, offering a gift to anyone letting her scan their number. There were no takers as they didn't want to waste their “precious” online time doing that.
The woman only approached female passengers. Maybe all of her company's products were aimed at them.
But what kept bothering me was the young man’s decision to hang up.
That also gave me an opportunity to chat with him. A very friendly chap, he is an IT professional working in downtown Beijing. Yes, an IT man detached from his smartphone!
He said he was traveling with a family member, and was not using the phone out of respect for her.
“When I am alone, I always use it,” the man said.
He was just as addicted as anyone else on that Line 5 train that morning.
And talking of cellphone addiction, Chinese consumers are at the top of the league. Remember, a Chinese city was one of the first in the world to introduce mobile phone sidewalks (Chongqing, in 2014).
The emergence of app-filled smartphones in the past few years has only made the problem worse. Just go to any Beijing market to see how addictive mobile devices have become.
I recently visited Beijing's famous textile market, where almost all sales associates were busy on their phones. Nobody seemed to be interested in selling anything.
When asked about an item on display at a store, the lone saleswoman looked irritated. She couldn't care less. The customer is not the king anymore, content is!
One reason for being constantly online, according to Di Jin, research manager at IDC China, International Data Corp’s local division, is that people are living more independently now than before.
"So, there's always an urge to connect."
Last year, a survey of US cellphone users by Dignity Health found that, on average, people checked their devices 134 times a day. That is equal to a check roughly every seven minutes, factoring in 16 waking hours, the survey concluded.
But for Chinese users, such numbers don't matter. They seldom look away from their mobile devices. They are forever tethered to their smartphones!
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