I’m always fascinated by the way people find unusual and unintended uses for the functionality provided by designers of technology.

A particular example I’ve been tracking for a while is the “Give me a missed call” approach I first saw practiced in India. It’s been around for quite a while now; if you want to delve into it, this post at kottke.org is a good place to start, to follow as you wish; in fact as a general rule kottke and smartmobs are good places to dig around for stuff like this. It is by no means restricted to India, as the Kottke post shows.

Why do I find this so fascinating? Because I think it has something to do with abundances and scarcities and the Because Effect, in a strange kind of way.

It’s all about affordability. Over thirty years ago, when I was still in Calcutta, international calls were (a) operator-based (b) very expensive and (c) often person-to-person. I’m sure there were many reasons why such calls were prohibitively expensive; to many of us, at least one of the reasons was some form of artificial scarcity.

And the response to this situation delighted me even then as a fifteen-year old stripling. A neighbouring family created a simple code, agreed in advance, to solve a simple problem. Their children tended to travel abroad while waiting for university offers and acceptances. They would call their children wherever they happened to be, person-to-person, with the first name of the synthetic “callee” or recipient, carrying the message, and the surname identifying the addressee. So a call for Stanford Philip would translate to “Philip, you have an offer letter from Stanford waiting for you at home”.

It seemed ingenious to me. Completed calls became expensive and “scarce”, while person-to-person not-completed calls became free and “abundant”.

Today’s equivalent is “give me a missed call”. I think there’s a lesson here for all of us.  And that is this:

When you create an artificial scarcity, the market will create an artificial abundance in response.

Comments?

Lazing on a Sunday afternoon, after family time at church and at lunch. Watching the cricket. And realising that I still hold out hope for India managing to get something out of this game. As long as England are bowled out before tea, and as long as the target is around 400, I live in hope. Could make for a very exciting day’s cricket tomorrow.

Reminds me of being at the Ataturk stadium with Isaac in 2005, when it was half-time and Liverpool were 3-0 down. And we started singing You’ll Never Walk Alone.

Hard to believe, I know, but it’s possible to get passionate about cricket.

Sean brought this to my attention, the blog-published story of Lorem Ipsum. Most of you have probably seen it as the standard filler text in sample templates from Microsoft PowerPoint. I’d seen it used in journalistic circles as filler for “to be completed” sections of dummied-up versions of magazines, but my sparse knowledge of it predated the web. So thank you Sean.

The way my mind works, the Lorem Ipsum reference took me back to Calcutta’s quiz league of the 1970s. I remember being asked who George Spelvin was; it wasn’t long after that when we were asked what the English equivalent of Spelvin was.

So, for those of you who hadn’t heard it before, here are the links to George Spelvin and Walter Plinge. I believe there used to be an equivalent for airline staff deadheading, but the use of fictional names in that context fell away for obvious reasons.

Sean asked how on earth I came across Wholphin. [For those who are interested, a wholphin is the name given to the offspring of bottlenose dolphins and false killer whales, as in this story here.]

In addition, Wholphin is a DVD magazine of unseen films. And part of the McSweeney’s stable, including the books, McSweeney’s magazine and The Believer.

Where else would I find dialogues like this:

EXCLUSIVE!
LEAKED EXCERPTS FROM
A SCREENPLAY WRITTEN
BY MY GRANDPARENTS IN
AN ATTEMPT TO CASH IN
ON THE SUPERHERO-
MOVIE CRAZE.

BY AARON SPIEWAK

– – – –

INT. CONDO OF JUSTICE—DAY

(GENIUS MAN and CLASSY LADY are receiving top-secret e-mails from the PRESIDENT, when disaster strikes. A strange noise, then the screen turns black.)

GENIUS MAN: It’s Mr. Internet. He’s locked us out of American Online’s Internets … again!

CLASSY LADY: Blast! If we don’t stop him, he’ll soon gain control of the world’s children, while they’re surfing the World Wide Web!

GENIUS MAN: Off to Mr. Internet’s lair, on Microsoft Computer Island! To the GeniusMobile!

CLASSY LADY: The GeniusMobile has been sounding funny. Did you get it checked like I asked?

GENIUS MAN: I was doing our taxes. I’ll get to it this week. (Grabs keys.)

CLASSY LADY: Remember your glasses this time. You almost ran over Sadie Zuckerman last Friday.

GENIUS MAN: That was because it was about to rain and you were talking to me. (Pats his shirt.) Where are those glasses?

I’ve been a McSweeney’s fan for a long time.  And of Wholphin from its inception.

A quote from Simon and Rupert Winchester’s Calcutta: A Brief History

The burgeoning wealth and importance of Calcutta during the nineteenth century meant that gradually it began to move beyond its colonial roots for the first time, and started to become a city that blended the influences of both East and West. The Bengal Renaissance, as it is known, is central to the pride Bengalis feel about their city, and a litany of names, most unfamiliar in the West, are known to everyone in Calcutta. Social reformers, educationalists, poets and nationalists became, and remain, household names in Calcutta, in a manner unknown in most other major cities of the world, but which seems entirely natural in Calcutta, high-minded as it is.

One of the drivers of the new attention to matters social and spiritual was the growth of printing. Bengalis have long been addicted to the adda, a group gossip and discussion session that can last for hours, and the printing press and periodicals allowed more Bengalis to participate in virtual addas. Around the bookshops that sprang around Dwarkanath Tagore’s  Hindu College a culture began to grow that, not content with having addas, began to talk to greater numbers of people, through pamphlets and periodicals. All of the great names of the Bengal Renaissance used periodicals for both polemical and creative writing. Between 1818 and 1867 there were some 220 different periodicals published in Calcutta, mainly in Bengali, freely discussing politics, culture and spirituality.

Markets. Conversations. Interest in education and social matters. Using technology to scale up into virtual conversations. In and around bookshops. Based on journalism and pamplets. You can see why I got interested in blogs.

Blogs are addas. On a digital scale. Without the caffeine and nicotine.