Ged Carroll

Category: culture | 文明 | 미디어와 예술 | 人文

Culture was the central point of my reason to start this blog. I thought that there was so much to explore in Asian culture to try and understand the future.

Initially my interest was focused very much on Japan and Hong Kong. It’s ironic that before the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative there was much more content out there about what was happening in Japan. Great and really missed publications like the Japan Trends blog and Ping magazine.

Hong Kong’s film industry had past its peak in the mid 1990s, but was still doing interesting stuff and the city was a great place to synthesise both eastern and western ideas to make them its own. Hong Kong because its so densely populated has served as a laboratory of sorts for the mobile industry.

Way before there was Uber Eats or Food Panda, Hong Kongers would send their order over WhatsApp before going over to pay for and pick up their food. Even my local McDonalds used to have a WhatsApp number that they gave out to regular customers. All of this worked because Hong Kong was a higher trust society than the UK or China. In many respects in terms of trust, its more like Japan.

Korea quickly became a country of interest as I caught the ‘Korean wave’ or hallyu on its way up. I also have discussed Chinese culture and how it has synthesised other cultures.

More recently, aspect of Chinese culture that I have covered has taken a darker turn due to a number of factors.

  • BMW i8 & other things this week

    BMW made a video about the production of the BMW i8 to promote the car. However the tone of the video feels rather like a corporate video from the 1980s. Despite the 1980s vibes the BMW i8 carbon fibre monocoque chassis manfucturing is fascinating. As is the manufacture of the BMW i8 high voltage battery. Unfortunately all this effort in manufacturing doesn’t seem to result in high reliability of the vehicles it makes.

    Reebok’s classic range looked to draw on the history of Manchester in this video. It split opinions in the office. Many of my colleagues liked it, but I felt a dissonance between the big speech about building the future with visuals that came straight from 1988. The MA1 jacket, the Reebok Classic trainer – the chav proto-shoe, brutalist architecture, a nice house with 1970s architecture and a mid-to-late 1980s BMW M535i – allegedly beloved of drug dealers trying to shift a load. The car looked discreet about its performance, but could still go like the clappers

    Great demonstration by Grandmaster Flash (of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five) of mixing circa 1983

    Kickstarter have a campaign running to reprint the New York Transit Authority’s standards manual which was much more than a style guide but went into things like the methodology of planning signage and usability of New York public transport. More design related content here.

    Anton Corbjin’s film A Most Wanted Man makes Hamburg amazing and gets great performances out of actors including Willem Defoe and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The film feels believable because it’s based on a John LeCarré novel of the same name. LeCarré’s post-cold war output was a critique of populism, globalisation and the political nature of the war on terror. As would be expected in the 21st century the US comes out of it pretty poorly. Corbjin gives an honest portrayal of the book.

  • Japanese week

    Things that made my day this week has a lot of a Japanese feel, this maybe some sort of invisible psychological hand of some sort as I am currently reading Ghost In The Shell Man-Machine Interface by Masamune Shirow, but more on that later.

    First up Bose have been positioning their brand as having a love for music through a series of short films, my favourite one was about how Japanese people have taken the Jamaican dancehall sound and done their own thing with it. Japanese dancers have won competitions in Jamaica. Like hip-hop and Chicano car culture before it, Japan put their own spin on it rather doing straight cultural appropriation. 

    Usagi Yojimbo is an American comic drawn by a Japanese American author Stan Sakai and based on classic Japanese chambara film, so you can imagine how psyched I was to know that this was a proof-of-concept prior to a possible animated film.

    Toyo Tires have combined their Japanese heritage with tire technology to come up with yakatas (traditional summer weight kimonos) with a tire tread based print that still didn’t seem out of place.
    Toyo Tire yakatas
    Toyo Tire yakatas
    Moving away from the land of the rising sun to China, Apple’s new iPad featuring Yaoband who use an iPad in a similar way to the way the Art Of Noise used the Fairlight CMI or hip-hop producers used the famous Akai MPC workstation series. It’s interesting that Apple is focusing the light back on creativity.

    Finally a vintage film about the MTR in Hong Kong complete with a stuffy voiceover and pseudo-Krautrock backing track. The trains look retro-futuristic in a Logan’s Run kind of way

    More Japan related content here.

  • Time lapse & things this week

    I don’t know what it was about this week, but I ended up looking at a whole pile of time lapse videos. These videos have become much more accessible. Modern smartphones have it as a standard feature, it has become easier to do time lapse video with professional photography equipment. Cheap time lapse timers are now available and there is software to easily stitch it all together.

    First up beautifully assembled footage of summertime in New York, this doesn’t give you a real feel of the humidity in New York. It is mesmerising though.

    Next a time lapse video that zooms pans and warps time in Pyongyang, North Korea. It is all the more remarkable given the careful curation of content that comes out about North Korea.

    Pirate Jams put together a mix of late 1980s to early 1990s tracks and their own recordings that sampled many others for i-D magazine and came up with this joyful mix. It is as at home on your car stereo as it is in your Zumba class. It fits into a wider nostalgia in dance music exemplified by nu-disco and mash-up culture.

    The Vinyl Factory put together 20 tracks as an introduction to the early balearic sound for generation-z. Balearic was a minority interest when it was originally out. The eclectic mix of music that people now listen to and genres from tropical house to nu-disco make Balearic sound as relevant today as it did in the mid-1980s.

    Burberry put together a great video showcase that shows how they use the Tencent WeChat / Weixin platform or as they put it Burberry and WeChat have created a series of creative collaborations and platform firsts that leverage WeChat’s unique functionality and responsive content capabilities. – This is very much in keeping with Burberry’s long push into exploring what digital retail would mean in a luxury environment?More related content here. Note: The original video seems to have been taken down as the licence on the music by Ed Harcourt had likely ran out.

  • Post 90s generation & things this week

    China’s post 90s generation

    Some nicely presented data insights on China’s post 90s generation, who are the most likely people to drive China’s next stage of economic growth through domestic consumption. The post 90s generation don’t have the same strong affinity for western brands that their older peers have. The post 90s generation have grown up as China has got better and better with sustained economic growth, infrastructure and power.

    It isn’t often that you see an interesting accessible presentation on online analytics, which is the reason why I thought I would share this one

    An interesting documentary on the relationship between ‘young people’ and brand interactions on social media. In many respects it reminds me of the way that I used brands as a teenager all be it in a real-world setting through consumerism. The power of brands as ‘social’ totem for identity. More related content here.

    A great drone-eye view of Hong Kong, though the Apple TV screensaver with an aerial view of Hong Kong is even better.

    The soundtrack of my week was a mix by Graham Park that he remastered and published online. He played the set at The Hacienda on February 1, 1992. It is a great snapshot of The Hacienda before a myriad of troubles finally closed the venue down. The set marks a time of eclecticism; with deep house, proto-progressive tracks and breaks all being played in the same mix; which would be largely unheard of in a club for the best part of 20 years.

  • A content desert?

    I started thinking about the idea of a content desert for a few reasons:

    Experian Marketing Services put out a really nice whitepaper out in June as part of their ConsumerSpeak series called Millennials come of age. One graph stood out to me; the split across generations between traditional and digital media consumption.
    media diet
    On the face of it, two things struck me, consumption of online media increased between millenials and generation X – but not in a way that makes them radically different – . There was also a marginal increase in overall consumption between generation Y and generation X. Is this due to media literacy, less commitments or they were having to work harder to get a similar amount of value from their media consumption?

    We had a focus group in the office looking at the personal media consumption habits of 18 – 24 year olds with an interest in sport. One of the things that came out of this was that they would only buy a magazine about their favourite sport if they were getting on a long plane journey. They thought it was ‘too expensive’ to spend £4 on a magazine. A colleague who sits near me loves the magazine and gets a lot out of the long form articles published in it. He uses these articles as social currency, in the office and with friends. However the panelists that we met felt that they could get everything they needed from sources that they perceived to be of equal quality via free online media.

    This stuck with me for a few days, then I realised why I kept churning it around in my mind. It reminded me of the kind of dialogue and decision-making process that was made by poorer people around food and nutrition. A mix of skewed value systems and economics brought a food desert into these areas.

    I wonder if we aren’t seeing the same thing in the media industry, whilst we know that Buzzfeed and their ilk provide easily-consumed low-quality content usually about first world problems or childhood nostalgia – are generation Y merely getting the media that they deserve? Will there be a content desert? How would a content desert impact brands and perceptions of value?

    A few things give me hope that there may not be; Vice Media is building the global news network that is defining the 2010s in the same way that Aljazeera defined the post-9/11 world and CNN defined the end of the cold war. Although you could argue that with Vice the bill is paid by branded entertainment on behalf of sponsors like Nike and Intel.

    Television has entered a new golden era in dramas; will media companies take the opportunity to reinvigorate factual programming? More related content here.