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Business cards

The Financial Times opined on the obsolescence of business cards. This has been a common theme for the past quarter of a century, so whether or not it’s actually news is up for debate.

Business cards have been a surprisingly accurate marker of my career’s evolution. Before college, when I was working in laboratories to save up, business cards were strictly for management. If anyone needed to reach me, they’d receive my name and extension number scribbled on a company compliments slip.

Fast forward to my early agency days, and changing my business cards became the immediate priority after receiving a promotion letter. I vividly recall discussing new cards with our office manager, Angie, to reflect my new title: from Account Executive to Senior Account Executive. While that promotion enabled me to buy my first home, it was the tangible act of updating my business cards that truly solidified that future title for me in my memory.

Building a network was an important part of development in the early part of my career and my manager at the time would ask us each week how many business cards we’d given out as a way of quantifying that development.

Business cards had a symbolism and status that was captured famously in Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and in memorable scene of its its subsequent film adaptation.

Even today in Asian countries, business cards come loaded with cultural symbolism and a distinct etiquette of exchange. The exchange of them is handy as it allows to lay out a model of who is around a meeting table based on the card collection, facilitating easier meeting communications.

Personal organisers

In the mid-1990s, the personal organiser was a staple, its prevalence varying depending on location and budget. These organisers typically featured loose-leaf pages for schedules, an address book, and a system for storing and archiving business cards, even those of people who had moved on. However, by 2001, the media was already concerned about the impending demise of the personal organiser and its potential impact on the business card’s future.

Filofax

Filofax has the reputation for being the most British of brands. It originally started off as an importer of an American product Lefax. Lefax was a Philadelphia-based business which made organisers popular within industry including power plant engineers in the early 20th century.

At that time electricity was considered to be the enabler that the internet is now, and Lefax helped to run power plants effectively and reliably. Filofax eventually acquired Lefax in 1992. During the 1980s, the Filofax became a symbol of professionalism and aspirational upward mobility. I was given one as soon as I started work, I still have it at my parents home. It’s leather cover didn’t even develop a patina, despite the beating it took in various parts of my work life: in night clubs, chemical plants and agency life. Filofax even became part of cinematic culture in the James Belushi film Taking Care of Business also known as Filofax in many markets.

Day-Timer

In the US, there was the Day-Timer system, which came out of the requirements of US lawyers in the early 1950s and became a personal management tool for white collar workers in large corporates like Motorola – who appreciated their whole system approach. Day-Timer was as much a lifestyle, in the same way that David Allen’s Getting Things Done® (GTD®) methodology became in the mid-2000s to 2010s. Customers used to go and visit the personal organiser factory and printing works for fun. Along the way, other products such as At-A-Glance and Day Runner had appeared as substitute products. Day-Timer inspired the Franklin Planner system; a similar mix of personal organiser and personal management philosophy launched in 1984.

By the mid-1990s, Day-Timer had skeuomorphic PC programme that mirrored the real-world version of the Day-Timer. At the time this and competitor applications would allow print-outs that would fit in the real world Day-Timer organiser. Day-Timer’s move to mobile apps didn’t so well and now it exists in a paper-only form catering to people wanting to organise their personal lives and home-workers.

Rolodex

While the Filofax allowed you take to your world with you, the Rolodex allowed you to quickly thumb through contacts and find the appropriate name.

Back when I first started my first agency job, I was given my first Rolodex frame. I spent a small fortune on special Rolodex business card holders. At my peak usage of Rolodex as a repository for my business contacts, I had two frames that I used to rifle through names of clients, suppliers and other industry contacts.

Rolodex became a synonym for your personal network, you even heard of people being hired for ‘their Rolodex’. For instance, here’s a quote from film industry trade magazine Hollywood Reporter: Former British Vogue Chief Eyes September for Launch of New Print Magazine, Platform (May 8, 2025):

…to blend “the timeless depth of print with the dynamism of digital” with coverage of top creative forces, no doubt leaning into Edward Enninful’s enviable Rolodex of A-list stars, designers and creators gathered through years spent in the fashion and media space with tenures at British Vogue and as European editorial director of Vogue.

If I was thinking about moving role, the first thing I would do is take my Rolodex frames home on a Friday evening. The fan of business cards is as delicate as it is useful. It doesn’t do well being lugged around in a bag or rucksack. Each frame would go home in a dedicated supermarket shopping bag.

The Rolodex was anchored to the idea of the desk worker. The knowledge worker had a workstation that they used everyday. Hot-desking as much the computer is the enemy of the Rolodex. My Rolodex usage stopped when I moved to Hong Kong. My frames are now in boxes somewhere in my parents garage. Doomed not by their usefulness, but their lack of portability.

Personal information management

The roots of personal information management software goes back ideas in information theory, cognitive psychology and computing that gained currency after the second world war.

As the idea of personal computers gained currency in the 1970s and early 1980s, personal information software appeared to manage appointments and scheduling, to-do lists, phone numbers, and addresses. The details of business cards would be held electronically.

At this time laptops were a niche computing device. Like the Rolodex, the software stayed at the office or in the den at home. NoteCards used software to provide a hybridisation of hypertext linkages with the personal information models of the real world. NoteCards was developed and launched in 1987, prefiguring applications like DevonTHINK, Evernote and Notion by decades.

As well as providing new links to data, computers also allowed one’s contacts to become portable. It started off with luggable and portable laptop computers.

Putting this power into devices that can fit in the hand and a coat pocket supercharged this whole process.

Personal digital assistants

Personal digital assistants (PDA) filled a moment in time. Mobile computer data connections were very slow and very niche on GSM networks. Mobile carrier pricing meant that it only worked for certain niche uses, such as sports photographers sending their images though to their agency for distribution to picture desks at newspapers and magazines. While the transfer rate was painfully slow, it was still faster than burning the images on to CD and using a motorcycle courier to their picture agency.

The PDA offered the knowledge worker their address book, calendar, email and other apps in their pocket. It was kept up to date by a cradle connected to their computer. When the PDA went into the cradle information went both ways, contacts and calendars updated, emails sent, content to be read on the PDA pushed from the computer. IBM and others created basic productivity apps for the Palm PDA.

IrDA

By 1994, several proprietary infra red data transmission formats existed, none of which spoke to each other. This was pre-standardisation on USB cables. IrDA was a standard created by an industry group, looking to combat all the proprietary systems. The following year, Microsoft announced support in Windows, allowing laptops to talk with other devices and the creation of a simple personal area network.

This opened the possibility of having mice and other input devices unconstrained by connecting cables. It also allowed PDAs to beam data to each other via ‘line of sight’ connections. The reality of this was frustrating. You would often have to devices an inch from each other and hold them there for an eternity for the data to crawl across. It wasn’t until 1999 that the first devices with Bluetooth or wi-fi appeared and a couple more years for them to become ubiquitous. Unsolicited messages over Bluetooth aka bluejacking started to appear in the early 2000s.

But IrDA provided a mode of communication between devices.

versit Consortium

versit Consortium sorted another part of the puzzle. In the early 1990s the blending of computer systems with telephony networks as gaining pace. A number of companies including Apple, IBM and Siemens came together to help put together common standards to help computer systems and telephony. In 1995, they had come up with the versitcard format for address book contacts, better known now as ‘vCards’. These were digital business cards that could be exchanged by different personal information management software on phones, computers and PDAs. For a while in the late 1990s and early 2000s I would attach my vCard on emails to new contacts. I still do so, but much less often.

The following year the same thing happened with calendar events as well.

Over time, the digital business card came to dominate, via device-to-device exchanges until the rise of LinkedIn – the professional social network.

Faster data networks allowed the digital business card sharing to become more fluid.

A future renaissance for the business card?

While business cards are currently seen outdated in the west, could they enjoy a renaissance? There are key changes in behaviour that indicate trends which would support a revitalisation of business cards.

Digital detox

While information overload has been a turn that has been with us since personal computers, digital detox is a new phenomenon that first started to gain currency in 2008 according to Google Books data. Digital detox as a concept has continued to climb. It has manifested itself with people talking a break from their screens including smartphones. Digital detox has continued to gain common currency.

Creating a need for tangible contact details in the form of a business card in certain contexts.

The pivot of personal organisers

Day-Timer and Filofax didn’t disappear completely. While Day-Timer is no longer a professional ‘cult’, it now helps remote workers organise their own work day at home. They also tap into the needs of people organising their own wedding. The paper plans also gives them a memento of this event in a largely digital world.

If personal organisers continue to exist then real-world business cards would also make sense in those contexts.

Bullet-journaling

Ryder Carroll is known as the ‘father’ of the bullet journal which was a home-made organisation method which was similar to the kind of task lists I was taught to pull together in my first agency role. There were aspects of it that would be familiar to Day-Timer advocates as well.

When the world was going digital Carroll used paper to help organise himself. Carroll tapped into the fact that even computer programmers use paper including notebooks and post-it notes to manage projects and personal tasks within those projects. Carroll took his ‘system’ public via Kickstarter project in 2013.

Bullet journaling provided its users with simplicity, clarity and an increased sense of control in their life. What is of interest for this post, is the move from the virtual back into paper organisation.

Changing nature of work

Hybrid working, remote working and increasing freelance communities in industry such as advertising has affected one’s professional identity. This has huge implications for personal standing and even mental health. Human connection becomes more important via virtual groups and real-world meet-ups. Controlling one’s own identity via a business card at these meet-ups starts to make an increasing amount of sense.

The poisoning of the LinkedIn well

On the face of it LinkedIn has been a wonderful idea. Have a profile that’s part CV / portfolio which allows your social graph of professional connections to move with you through your career. Services were bolted on like advertising, job applications and corporate pages to attract commercial interest and drive revenue.

Over time, LinkedIn has increased the amount of its creator functions, driving thought leadership content that is a prime example of enshitification. 2025 saw ‘thought leaders’ publishing generative AI created posts as entirely their own work.

LinkedIn has become devalued as a digital alternative to the humble business card.

More related posts can be found here.

July 11, 2025
Living with the Casio GW-9500 Mudman G-Shock
The Casio GW-9500 Mudman isn’t my first G-Shock by a long-shot. I thought it would make a bit of sense explaining what it’s like to live with and why I wear it at a time when the world is becoming more connected and documented.

My relationship with the Casio G-Shock started with my time scuba diving. At school my friend Neil had a Casio DW-100, which was a pre-G-Shock digital dive watch, only available in the Japan and the US at the time.

I was introduced to diving when working in my second job out of school by a colleague. I started using an old DW-5500 attached by an Animal velcro strap to my buoyancy compensator of my dive kit, that was gifted to me by a friend. It served as a back-up timer to my dive watch. I couldn’t afford a dive computer. At the time I had a friend who worked in a dive shop and my lessons were done by former military divers. I probably couldn’t afford similar equipment now if I decided to return to driving.

I also wouldn’t be doing the kind of dives we did back then thanks to the governing bodies de-risking the sport to the point of boredom, that’s a subject for another post.

Why do I wear a GW-9500 now?

It makes sense to tell a little bit around why I wear G-Shocks. I want an accurate watch (who doesn’t?). I want a dependable watch (again, probably a hygiene factor for most people). G-Shock offers robustness that 30 years ago would have come from fine Swiss or Japanese engineering – but at a much lower price point. Although the price point for G-Shocks has been steadily increasing.

The GW-9500, alongside other G-Shocks is what watch people would call a ‘beater’. It will take whatever life throws at it, from colliding into door handles, being dropped, to its water resistance – you don’t have to worry about it.

G-Shocks are the grey man of watches, despite some models being colourful – they are ubiquitous on any street from London to Manilla. They blend in with the crowd and are less likely to draw attention. This makes them the ideal ‘London watch‘.

The Apple Watch is closing in on this status in London now, but requires regular charging and is also more fragile than your average G-Shock.

I work in a creative role, my usual work outfit consists of:
- T-shirts
- Flannel shirts, sweatshirts or fleece quarter-zips
- Jeans or climbing pants
- Suede hiking boots or trainers
All of which make the G-Shock an ideal accessory for my form-follows-function wardrobe.

Industrial design of the GW-9500

The design of the GW-9500 is based on form following function. The buttons are designed so that they can be pushed with gloves, but still protected from accidental use. The ‘armouring’ helps protect the watch screen.

Casio worked out a lot of these lessons with the early Casio G-Shock Mudman and Rangeman watches. These models in turn borrowed the learnings of even earlier G-Shock models. G-Central did a good job at teasing out all the G-Shock family tree that led up to the GW-9500 – the link is at the bottom of the article.

The feel of the industrial design evokes the product design in Japanese anime like Ghost In The Shell or Evangelion – where things are over-designed. That has a certain appeal for me.

Materials

One of the biggest steps forward with the GW-9500 is the materials that the watch is made from. The movement and glass is held in a carbon fibre composite case. In my other G-Shock watches, this core case is made of plastic, stainless steel or titanium. This is one reason why the GW-9500 is very noticeably lighter than my other models. It’s also noticeably thinner, yet still offers the same protection.

Casio also has one eye on sustainability, with the watch strap being made of plastic material made from biomass rather than oil based plastic. The plastic is tough but not as supple as the polyurethane straps on cheaper G-Shocks. This bio-plastic strap isn’t as comfortable to wear and doesn’t break in over time. Ideally if I had the option, I would switch the strap out for adaptors and a NATO strap instead, even though it would ruin the aesthetic. After four decades, Casio could still learn a lot from Seiko’s polyurethane dive watch straps.

Connectivity

I have mechanical watches, an Apple Watch Ultra and my range of G-Shocks including the GW-9500 sit somewhere in between these two technological extremes.

The GW-9500 syncs its time via a series of atomic clocks that broadcast around the world. It is aware of its surroundings thanks to its digital compass, altimeter, barometer and temperature. All of this isn’t new technology,

A compass is surprisingly handy even in today’s age. The enemy of satellite navigation is tall buildings. They increase the amount of time that GPS takes to lock on and you end up with less precise positioning. A compass doesn’t have that problem allowing you to orient yourself.

Casio seems to have raided the parts bin of its ProTek series of watches. It doesn’t have Bluetooth, wi-fi or connect to a phone app – which means that obsolescence is less of a concern.

Power comes from on face solar panels that keep the watch battery topped up, rather than relying on a cradle like smartwatches.

Having a watch that just tells the time and has a timer or two for cooking allows me to disconnect from the always-on connected world of the smartwatch and smartphone.

Display

The display on the GW-9500 had a large screen that unlike its G-Shock peers doesn’t make an efficient use of the real estate. That approach has benefits, the sparce screen design and large numerals provide a very glanceable display.

It is well illuminated by a while LED that covers the whole of the display. The light is carefully balanced between bright enough to be clearly legible, and dull enough to not ruin your night vision.

Software

One of the benefits of getting a G-Shock over the years is that you feel right at home, for the most part, new G-Shock watches like the GW-9500 operated like older G-Shock models. The exception to this is when Casio tries to become a connected smartwatch as that part of the market is still in flux.

However the legacy software model requires a degree of patience in comparison to modern phone apps. The GW-9500 like all legacy G-Shocks uses what’s known as a modal approach. You want to set something you go into the set mode and then cycle through to the feature that you want to change. If you don’t get it write, then you have to cycle through the different functions and start again.

I grew up setting my parents video cassette recorder and answering machine so the experience isn’t that alien to me. The Hemingway Editor app also takes this approach with two modes: ‘write’ and ‘edit’ which works well with my text creation process.

As a watch experience, it works perfectly well, and once you have done it a few times you can use 80 percent of any legacy G-Shock watch without consulting the instructions – which still come in a satisfyingly thick paper book about the size of a box of matches.

Are there things that I would like improved? Yes, absolutely. A bugbear of mine, working with other people around the world is the different time zone function. A feature it shares with ChatGPT at the time of writing is that the GW-9500 doesn’t allow for countries which have daylight savings times changing in time difference during spring and summer. So I have ended up calling Asian colleagues an hour early by accident.

Is the GW-9500 a keeper?

The Casio Mudman GW-9500 has its faults, such as comfort, when worn for a prolonged time and the time-zone issue. But those are minor compared to its benefits.

More information

History of the G-Shock Mudmaster and Mudman series of mud-resistant watches | G-Central
June 21, 2025
Layers of the future
This post about layers of the future was inspired by an article that I read in the EE News. The article headline talked in absolutes: The external power adapter Is dead. The reality is usually much more complex. The future doesn’t arrive complete; instead we have layers of the future.

Science fiction as an indicator.

The 1936 adaption by Alexander Korda of HG Wells The Shape of Things To Come shows a shiny complete new utopia. It is a tour-de-force of art deco design, but loses somewhat in believability because of its complete vision.

https://youtu.be/knOd-BhRuCE?si=HfIDYsaa7nUZKrYE

This is partly explained away by a devastating war, largely influenced by the Great War which had demonstrated the horrendous power of artillery and machine guns. The implication being that the layers of architecture assembled over the years had been literally blown away. So architects and town planners would be working from a metaphorical clean sheet, if you ignore land ownership rights, extensive rubble, legacy building foundations and underground ground works like water pipes, sewers, storm drains and cable ducting.

In real-life, things aren’t that simple. Britain’s major cities were extensively bombed during the war. The country went under extensive rebuilding in the post-war era. Yet even in cities like Coventry that were extensively damaged you still have a plurality of architecture from different ages.

In the City of London, partly thanks to planning permission 17th century architecture exists alongside modern tower blocks.

Contrast the blank sheet approach of Things To Come with the immersive story nature of anime Ghost In The Shell; which based its architecture on Hong Kong.

You can see a mix of modern skyscrapers, tong tau-style tenements and post-war composite buildings that make the most of Hong Kong’s space. Given Hong Kong’s historically strong real estate marketplace, there are very strong incentives to build up new denser land uses, yet layers of architecture from different ages still exist.

COBOL and other ‘dead’ languages.

If you look at computer history, you realise that it is built on layers. Back in the 1960s computing was a large organisation endeavour. A good deal of these systems ran on COBOL, a computer language created in 1958. New systems were being written in COBOL though the mid-2000s for banks and stock brokerages. These programmes are still maintained, many of them still going long after the people who wrote them had retired from the workforce.

These systems were run on mainframe computers, though some of these have been replaced by clusters of servers. IBM still serves its Z-series of mainframe computers. Mainframe computing has even been moved to cloud computing services.

In 1966, MUMPS was created out of a National Institute of Health project at Massachusetts General Hospital. The programming language was built out of frustration to support high performing databases. MUMPS has gone on to support health systems around the world and projects within the European Space Agency.

If you believe the technology industry all of these systems have been dead and buried by:
- Various computer languages
- Operating systems like UNIX, Linux and Windows
- Minicomputers
- Workstations
- PCs and Macs
- Smartphones and tablets
- The web
At a more prosaic level infrastructure like UK railway companies, German businesses and Japanese government departments have been using fax machines over two decades since email became ubiquitous in businesses and most households in the developed world.

The adoption curve.

The adoption curve is a model that shows how products are adopted. The model was originally proposed by academic Everett Rogers in his book Diffusion of Innovations, published in 1962. The blue line is percentage of new users over time and the yellow line is an idealised market penetration. However, virtually no innovations get total adoption. My parents don’t have smartphones, friends don’t have televisions. There are some people that still live off the grid in developed countries without electricity or indoor plumbing.

When you look at businesses and homes, different technologies often exist side-by-side. In UK households turntables for vinyl records exist alongside streaming systems. Stuffed bookshelves exist alongside laptops, tablets and e-readers.

Yahoo! Internet Life magazine

Yahoo! Internet Life magazine is a microcosm of this layers of the future co-existence . Yahoo! is now a shadow of its former self, but its still valued for its financial news and email. The company was founded in 1994, just over 30 years ago. It was in the vanguard of consumer Internet services alongside the likes of Wired, Excite, Go, MSN, Lycos and Netscape’s Net Center.

Yahoo! Internet Life magazine was published in conjunction with Ziff Davis from 1996 to 2002. At the time when it was being published the web was as much a cultural force as it was a technology that people adopted. It was bigger than gaming or generative AI are now in terms of cultural impact. Yet there was no incongruity in being a print magazine about online media. Both existed side-by-side.

Post-print, Yahoo! Life is now an online magazine that is part of the Yahoo! web portal.

Technology is the journey, not the destination.

Technology and innovation often doesn’t meet the ideals set of it, for instance USB-C isn’t quite the universal data and power transfer panacea that consumers are led to believe. Cables and connectors that look the same have different capabilities. There is no peak reached, but layers of the future laid on each other and often operating in parallel. It’s a similar situation in home cinema systems using HDMI cables or different versions of Bluetooth connected devices.
November 13, 2024
Trends and fads
Why trends and fads?

Why trends and fads came about as a post, was that I was scrolling on my LinkedIn notifications on a Saturday (I know, I know I should keep my life free of this crap on the weekends.) Creative Review were talking about how trend forecasting had become rusty, but that got me thinking about did they understand the difference between trends and fads?

A good deal of what I see described as trends are fads, which then got me wondering about how do I help people differentiate between trends and fads.

Why has it become harder to differentiate likely trends and fads?

I would argue that the difficulty in differentiating likely trends and fads is down to a few reasons.
- The nature of culture has changed. It has become massively parallel in nature. This has in turn impacted trends
- Culture has become elongated in nature.
- The changing nature of culture means trends surface and submarine again over time.
Mass to massively parallel.

Culture has become massively parallel. Culture and its nature has been transformed over the last century. There were a few sub-cultures at best that mattered at a given given moment in time.

The idea of the ‘teenager’ which was the first attempt to carve out a new generation was done in the post-war affluence of America and latterly European countries, Japan and Korea as economic development took hold. We might use different language now, but teenagers were the engines for the sale of goods and services:
- New music
- New spaces (gaming arcades, fast food restaurants, coffee shops, instant messaging platforms, social platforms)
- New fashion looks (mods, rockers, greasers, ravers, emo, gorpcore etc.)
At the time, the mass media helped facilitated the propagation of a mass culture. A few music publications, radio stations, newspapers and TV stations could make a break an artist. We can see this over time with the power of Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin or Ed Sullivan in the US, Gay Byrne and Gerry Ryan in Ireland or Top of the Pops and Pete Tong in the UK.

Ed Sullivan introduces The Beatles.

Paul McCartney remembering the 1964 show.

However a combination of economic improvement and technology saw the mass media broaden with countless publications, TV channels, radio stations, websites and social channels until it is no longer ‘mass’ in nature.

Add to this, the world got smaller. Travel while still expensive became cheaper from the 1970s and 1980s onwards allowing more people to discover culture from elsewhere. And this was despite a massive surge in the price of oil due to troubles in the Middle East. So trends and fads moved around the world. Liverpool lads brought the ideas of sports casual dress from Spanish and French department stores, Japan borrowed various parts of Americana and streetwear, hip hop went around the world.

The connectivity from the worldwide web put this in overdrive. A world of culture opened up making things massively parallel, which allowed people to pick and choose their own cues. These choices gave us massively parallel culture and resulting trends.

Culture has become elongated in nature.

I have friends (and associates) in their late 50 and early 60s who DJ, surf, skateboard and do martial arts. These were people who remember club nights before house music let alone EDM, who can remember the first skate parks being built in the UK and knew of Stüssy because they were part of the original Stüssy tribe of interesting folks formed by Shawn himself.

People who might listen to Radio 4 on occasion, but are still cooler and more culturally relevant than many teenagers. Probably more culturally relevant than their college age kids.

This cultural elongation is something that we’re starting to see gen-z obsessed agencies. A good example of this is ZAK Agency’s Learn To Time Travel white paper. Part of it has been down to life stages happening later for each generation; or not at all.
- Moving out on your own.
- Settling down.
- Having children.
- Buying their own home.
- Being able to afford to retire.
Part of it is down to the world norms changing. I seldom have had to wear a shirt and tie, or suit to work. My Dad wore a tie right up until the mid-1980s to work, because that was expected of him. He wasn’t a banker, but a shipyard worker. Athletes can potentially stay in peak condition for longer, all made possible by the modern world.

Despite what we believe about technology usage, for those who are 70 or younger, income influences tech adoption as much as age related knowledge. Giving all of us access to as much culture as we can mainline.

Fads

If you hear the phrase ‘TikTok trends’ that are fast-changing, it’s a clue that it’s likely to be a fad unless by some blessed miracle it sticks. In the 20th century, fads were often easier to spot and the 1970s in particular were a gold mine for the fad spotter.

Fads appear, go large and then disappear. They are ethereal in nature, rather like most TikTok trends. The Pet Rock is a prime example with its swift rise and demise.

Pet Rock

Northern California-based copywriter Gary Dahl came up with the idea of a pet rock. Essentially adhesive googly eyes attached to a rounded pebble that might feel pleasing in your hand for skimming across a body of still water like a lake. Dahl’s insight came from sitting with friends in a bar and listening to complain about the challenges of pet care.

Dahl started off his project by writing a satirical pet care manual for a rock, based on the kind of care guide a veterinarian might have for a new dog owner. This included on tips for when your rock was feeling anxious.

The rock came with the instruction book for care, it sat in a nest of long wood shavings inside a card carrying crate with a handle on top and seven vent holes on each side.

Dahl put his product into the market in August 1975. Dahl was apparently selling 10,000 rocks a day and it became a gag gift over the Christmas period with estimates on sales as between 1 million to 1.5 million genuine rocks. By February 1976, they started to need discounting. Dahl ploughed his profits into opening the Carry Nation’s bar in Los Gatos, which is still there.

The Pet Rock was clearly a fad, yet it did inspire my junior school art teacher to get us to collect stones from a visit to the beach, stick googly eyes on them and varnish the whole lot. Some were brought home and the rest sold at the school fair. Dahl wasn’t able to patent his idea. As far as I know around 2010, someone started an abortive business replicating Dahl’s packaging design and rocks.

Dahl built his freelance copywriting business up into an agency that produced radio and television ads for local businesses including wireless providers, technology firms and dot coms. The reason for this was that Campbell had been living in the Silicon Valley area as it grew up into what we know today. Dahl even wrote the For Dummies guide on advertising in 2001, which is still available today and is a good primer on the process. Dahl passed away in 2015.

Trends are resurgent, surfacing and submarining over time.

Take the idea of cocooning in our own soundscape as an example of a resurgent trend. If you go on the public transport headphones or AirPod type earphones are ubiquitous. If you go and work in an office, you will see a similar set up. Prior to the rise of the AirPods it would have more likely been Sony or Bose over-ear headphones rather than wireless AirPods.

Back in the early 1970s, my Dad took the train down to London while listening to a collection of cassettes he’d made of his record collection. The trip was one he occasionally made for the shipyard where he worked at the time. It was a long slow train journey. We had a bulky luggable cassette player similar to the one below and he wore a pair of headphones bought in Liverpool that looked like sturdy ear protectors. The tape machine was more designed for basic portable recording such as a manager recording a memo to be typed up. They were occasionally pressed into service in a similar way to my Dad’s usage.

Around about the same time, luggable stereos were being made by European manufacturers including Philips and Grundig. Soon after that Japanese manufacturers like Sharp, Sony and Panasonic released their own versions which were very successful. These were cemented into culture by young Americans who valued their portability and bass response.

Beck at Yahoo! Hack Day with a boom box

Boomboxes weighed a lot, Sony provided an alternative with the Walkman and eventually the Discman. These were portable cassette and CD players respectively which offered personal listening with headphones. These were briefly joined by MiniDisc players.

Around about the time when the web started to take off, you had early MP3 players such as the Rio series of machines and the CreativeLabs Nomad. But things took off with the Apple iPod, offering a new level of personal audio freedom.

Eventually a confluence of the smartphone as digital Swiss Army knife and BlueTooth wireless standards provided us with our current personal audio freedom.

Cocooning is just one example. As far back as the post-war era we have seen military surplus clothing go in and out of style. Thrifting has taken a similar route with it driving the iconic grunge look of the early 1990s and the Dpop shopping of today’s young people.

We could quite easily come up with a list of trends that never die. The annual trend reports tweaking the relative volumes on these trends over time to match economic and socio-cultural changes.

More related content here.
April 5, 2024
Listening pleasure
I was reminded by an article in an old copy of the FT’s HTSI (How To Spend It) magazine about the diversity of what listening pleasure means to different people.

My own pre-amp / power amp combo

Aural wallpaper

For many of us, the personal equivalent of muzak masks distracting sounds in the neighbourhood or the odd sounds emanating from the heating pipes. It is a listening pleasure of sorts, masking things that might otherwise side track or agitate us while we carry on our own lives. Prior to COVID this meant an office or coffee shop full of workers with Bose noise cancelling headsets on, now its more likely to be Apple AirPods firmly implanted, although they struggle to hold up to the demands of a days worth of Microsoft Teams calls.

In the home it can be: your smartphone, your computer, BlueTooth speaker, the radio, an old boombox or the TV set. I have a ritual in hotel rooms where after dropping my bags, the 24 hour TV news channel goes on low volume, ideally CNN. If I can’t get that, then I connect up my laptop and stream Bloomberg Live or podcasts.

Dedicated listening

If you derive listening pleasure by focusing more on what you are listening to then a higher quality system makes sense. Digital and analogue media can both provide a high quality audio experience. There are some fantastic vintage systems out there, it’s worthwhile educating yourself on products and setting up those eBay searches. Some streaming services now claim better than CD quality audio too, but more on that later.

Good quality speakers can be inexpensive, though brands and models which were bargains just five years ago are now expensive as purchasers have educated themselves. A good deal of the listening pleasure from these kind of systems is the hunt and building the system as much as what you have playing through it.

Space is the place

Good quality audio performance is dependent on the source, the hi-fi, the speakers and the room that the hi-fi is set up in. A room can enormously impact speaker performance. When I used to DJ, I found this out to my cost. Perfectly parallel walls create reverb meaning you can have multiple versions of a recording coming back to you. Furniture and people are great at absorbing bass.

Despite what you might see in hi-fi shows held in hotels, few of us have a room that would do a pair of B&W Nautilus justice, nor do we need a top of the range Mark Levinson amplifier.

Instead it makes sense to look at good quality headphones, I use AKG K872 headphones. But this also means that you can get supporting hardware by the likes of Schiit Audio for a much more reasonable price.

What sounds good is subjective and different equipment lends itself to different use cases. Do you want to listen to music, films or games? What genres will you be listening too?

If you like fuzzbox-driven rock music, you probably wouldn’t like my audio system. My tastes vary from Vladimir Cosma and Manuel Göttsching to The Reflex, Jeff Mills and even a bit of Jim Reeves and Johnny Cash. I spent a good deal of my youth in friends bedroom recording studios and DJing in night clubs. All of which affected what sounds good to me. My own listening pleasure leans to a more analytical, transparent sound.

The source

Finally, there is the fidelity of recordings themselves, in the late 1990s and 2000s we saw what some musicians would call the ‘Loudness’ wars. Recordings were overly compressed by mastering engineers and we now have a generation of engineers who think that this is how things are done and genuinely believe that they are addressing the listening pleasure of the general public. Veteran audio engineers and hi-fi enthusiasts have noticed a 10+dB difference in recording sound levels. In reality each dB a doubling in volume as you hear it, so 10dB is a 1,204 times louder. Why did the over-compression happen? There are a number of hypotheses:
- Digital signal processors and digital audio workstation software made it easier to tweak everything and so people did.
- Older recordings get digitally remastered with an expectation that these recordings will be played on BlueTooth speakers and smartphones.
- I have heard the remastering is also for car stereos as well, but the reality is that many car stereos have been better than the average persons home audio system for decades – because they are designed for the vehicle cabin.
- The decline of consumers actively listening to music, using it as aural wallpaper, so looking for a constant volume.
- The rise of nascent streaming services like Real Networks and Yahoo! Music.
How do you know what is the best level of compression? This is a matter of personal taste. It depends on the genres of the music you like, does it have highs and lows? Are there quiet segments or pauses before a breakdown? Does it makes use of stereo spacing to move its sweeping sound around you?

Audio spacing is important not only for listening to music but gaming and the home cinema experience.

The problem with modern streaming services that look to provide ‘better than CD quality audio’ is as much on the original source as it is about the quality of streaming. Apple has tried to address this with its ‘Mastered for iTunes’ tools optimising for its platform, but that doesn’t have universal adoption in terms of remastering.

The reality might be closer to what I saw at Yahoo! Music in the mid-2000s where ‘mastering’ for the service meant ripping retail compact disc using a HP desktop PC and uploading the song to the servers. Nothing particularly special was involved in the process.

More information

How much should you pay for your speakers? FT HTSI magazine

Ruining Oxygene | renaissance chambara

The Vintage Knob – some of the best content on vintage quality Japanese hi-fi

Sennheiser HD250 II Linear headphones | renaissance chambara
December 3, 2023

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