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.

  • Fans + more news

    China is intensifying efforts to check the “chaotic” power of online celebrity fan clubs – Asian fans are something else, so this is not surprising. Asian Fans will spend a fortune on their favourite bands records. They will take out full page newspaper advertisements or billboards wishing their favourite artist happy birthday. In China, the party is always first, not pop stars. Fans will be clamped down on, unless they’re fans of Xi Jingping. More on what Asian fandom here.

    ‘Heavy’ versus ‘Light’ business philosophies in Chinese tech – Chinese Characteristics – really interesting idea to describe culture. Heavy is a business that relies on people to make to ‘make’ the product. TikTok would be heavy. Deepmind would be a light business. Heavy businesses tend to do soft innovation

    Chinese ecommerce site Shein hit with trademark disputes | Financial Times – “As long as they have the audience that they do, they’re going to determine that it’s worth their time and energy to move products as quickly as possible — even if some of those products violate intellectual property norms.” – business as usual in Chia then (paywall)

    Farewell, Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy – The New York Times – Uber journeys subsidised by VC money. I was reminded of the ludicrously low prices of dot.com era e-tailing sites

    Hong Kong star Karen Mok comes under fire in China for wearing Dolce & Gabbana in music video | South China Morning Post – The studio of Hong Kong pop singer Karen Mok has been forced to issue an apology after she prompted controversy on Chinese social media for wearing Dolce & Gabbana in her latest music video. The brand has been seen in some quarters as anti-Chinese following a 2018 controversy over an advertisement that showed an Asian woman trying to eat pizza and spaghetti with chopsticks. The adverts were criticised by mainland audiences for “publicly insulting China” and the crisis escalated after an online leak of screenshots from a private conversation showed Stefano Gabbana, the brand’s co-founder, making insulting remarks about the country. Gabbana and the brand’s co-founder Domenico Dolce eventually issued a public apology. – how fragile is the Chinese collective ego? This makes China look weak.

    The Telegram Billionaire and His Dark Empire – DER SPIEGEL – interesting if dramatic profile of Telegram messaging platform

    Japan’s Perceptions of Otaku: Then and Now – The Tokusatsu Network – interesting change in media and consumer attitudes to otaku. More people self identify as otaku, so the media has had to change. More Japan related content here.

    Retail Could Have A Bigger Comeback Than Expected. Here’s Why. – Robb Report – interesting US estimates – the National Retail Federation revised up its annual outlook: It predicted that retail sales will now grow between 10.5 percent and 13.5 percent to the range of $4.44 trillion to $4.56 trillion. That compares with $4.02 trillion in retail sales last year

    Brown Thomas and Arnotts could be changing owners – I wouldn’t be surprised if LVMH’s DFS business didn’t bid for Brown Thomas. Ireland is too small a market (even with tourists) for single brand boutiques

    Wikipedia’s Surprising Power in Shaping Science: A New MIT Shows How Wikipedia Shapes Scientific Research | Open Culture 

  • 6G development + more things

    6G development

    Japan teams up with Finland on 6G development – Nikkei Asia the consortium on 6G development features a number of familiar names. On the Japanese side the following organisations are involved:  includes NTT, NTT DOCOMO, KDDI, SoftBank, Rakuten Mobile and the University of Tokyo. I was a bit surprised not to see NEC here as they are Japan’s domestic telecoms equipment manufacturer. From Finland you have the following 6G development partners: University of Oulu and Nokia. (Paywall)

    Culture

    Part one of what is due to be a three part podcast: oral history of The Avalanches – Since I left you 

    Ethics

    The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax — ProPublica – validation of what everyone suspected. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a strategic leak by the Biden administration

    Finance

    China’s bid for digital-yuan sphere raises red flags at G-7 – Nikkei Asia – total information awareness of global markets, surveillance and money that can be invalidated at the push of a key….

    Indian tycoons surpass Chinese tech moguls in global rich list | Financial Times – which says more about the Chinese government clipping the laissez faire approach to its tech entrepreneurs

    Luxury

    Why Shenzhen – not Hong Kong – is luxury’s new golden ticket – only Hong Kong’s property oligarchs will be sad to see this happen

    Marketing

    ‘How the hell have we allowed this to happen?’ Rory Sutherland on creative devaluation | Campaign Live – I think that its down to a wider marketing focus on performance marketing rather than brand building

    Olympics: India drops Chinese kit sponsor ahead of Tokyo Games | Olympics News | Al Jazeera – not great for Li-Ning

    Media

    The underground zines that kept self-expression alive in Mao’s China – The Boston Globe – Despite Beijing’s tight control of the printed word and its dissemination, a new and diffuse network of underground printers — low-tech, affordable, remarkably flexible, and incredibly hard to police — springs up. Equipped with nothing more than Chinese typewriters, mimeograph machines, and stencil duplicators, underground publishers mass-produce an untold quantity of materials for a vast and diverse readership.

    Security

    How to Turn Off Amazon Sidewalk | WIRED – For the Echo family of speakers, open the Alexa mobile app and go to More, Settings, Account Settings, Amazon Sidewalk and choose Disable. In the Ring app, go to the Control Center, Amazon Sidewalk, Disable, Confirm.

    Technology

    iPhone? AirPods? MacBook? You Live in Apple’s World. Here’s What You Are Missing. – WSJ – (paywall) more Apple related content here.

    Web of no web

    Finnish Group Readies Non-cellular Technology for IoT – EE Times Europe

  • Harmony Korine & things that made last week

    Film director Harmony Korine has shot a number of spots for convenience store 7-Eleven. If Korine’s name sounds familiar he is most famous for writing Kids and directing the dystopian 1997 movie Gummo – that paints an unflattering picture of midwest America. Much of the rest of his work has been making music videos and brand movies for luxury fashion houses Gucci & Dior.

    In his posts for 7-Eleven Harmony Korine riffs off the American Graffiti vibes of the convenience stores with parking around them and combined that with sub cultures on YouTube. Most notably the Japanese dancing rockabilly gangs of Yoyogi Park, Tokyo. (More Japan related content here.)

    https://youtu.be/hBCf83SA9j4

    Another video riffs on the recently raised profile of African American culture in skating rinks following the documentary United Skates.

    https://youtu.be/kEOzBqOjWGU

    If you had caught the The Lord of The Rings bug before the Peter Jackson movie adaption, you would be familiar to with two things. The first was the Ralph Bakshi animated adaptation, which unfortunately didn’t see its second part made due to faults mostly on the side of United Artists. The second would be Brian Sibley’s radio adaptation for the BBC, that still remains in publication as a CD audio book. Sibley did this fantastic interview on the the making of the radio drama and the reaction to it. Back in 1981, The Lord of The Rings adaptation had been destination radio, with listeners being sure to tune in to each episode.

    Really interesting interview with plus size influencer Saucye West. It highlights a new economy in plain sight. It is also interesting how the the body positive movement has bifurcated along racial lines, partly due to body shape. The business aspect of it is really interesting. She is an influencer and also advises brands on size 26+ products. There is the discussion about the lack of brand purpose in plus size clothings.

  • Bill Bernbach & things that made last week

    Bill Bernbach

    Advertising pioneer Bill Bernbach in conversation with Helmut Krone talk about advertising with some interesting examples of what we’d now call challenger marketing. I have been reading Bill Bernbach Said this week. Its a book of quotes from Bernbach that advertising DDB compiled over his time as a leader. The Avis ads were famous to me as they were cited by my lecturers in college.

    I want my MTV

    George Lois talks about ‘I want my MTV’ and Lee Clow talks about working on Apple‘s advertising in the 1980s in a panel at the 2013 Cannes Lions. Interesting lines about the courage to fight for your work, which is much harder to do now. I want my MTV is an example of creating demand pull from consumers through the cable TV companies.

    Steve Jobs apparently referenced Bill Bernbach in meetings with Lee Clow, which is unusual for 25 year old non-marketer, even today. From the beginning Jobs was citing the Sony brand as an influence.

    Skate birds

    RTÉ News made a short film on how Irish women are taking up skateboarding and making the sport more inclusive by nature. The skate park looks like one of the original concrete ones from the first era of skateboarding popularity during the late 1970s. Skateboarding had a small but dedicated following, probably less so than the UK.

    Storytelling in County Clare

    Great archive footage of Irish storytelling in 1979, shot in a pub in Co. Clare. Seanchaí (shan-a-key) were Irish storytellers, they entertained crowds in pubs and local households before television. With recordings devices, researchers travelled around the countryside capturing oral history, songs and stories for National Folklore Archive, now kept at University College Dublin. In the 1960s at tourism picked up in Ireland, there was increased interest in their craft.

  • Metabolist architecture + more things

    Metabolist architecture

    kisho kurokawa’s metabolist ‘capsule house K’ from the 1970s to be preserved in japan – the metabolist group, formed by architects, designers and critics, imagined a world of flexible cities where buildings, like people, were transient and ever changing. designed and built between 1971 and 1973, ‘capsule house K’ exemplifies the ideas of metabolism, recyclability and exchangeability – What separates the Japanese metabolist architecture and design movement from the western prefab manufacturing is that it was genuinely modular. A single capsule like this house could exist on its own, or could be part of a tower structure. The focus on flexible cities at the centre of metabolist design and the idea of recyclability. The western prefab approach is all about bringing product line techniques to create quick builds.

    Consumer behaviour

    Taking Stock With Teens – Spring 2021 Infographic 

    Marketing

    Did pharma overshoot digital sales rep calls? Study charts decline in effectiveness | FiercePharma – I think that there are interesting implications for a lot of digital marketing activities, like LinkedIn and email marketing

    Media

    The Wall Street Journal’s Internal Audit – The New York Times – none of the editors understand digital and that the paper is unlikely to have any success reaching the younger readers they desperately need without managing to write something about either race or gender. More media related content here.

    Security

    A secretive Home Office unit has hoarded data on millions of people | WIRED UK – more than 30 data providers are listed in the documents. Only two of these, fraud prevention company GB Group and data analytics firm, Dun & Bradstreet, were not redacted. GB Group acknowledged it provided data to the unit but declined to provide any further details citing “confidentiality obligations”. Dun & Bradstreet says it is against its policy to comment on its work with clients. I’d be surprised if they weren’t

    Technology

    Microsoft accelerates industry cloud strategy for healthcare with the acquisition of Nuance – Stories – I wonder what this means for Apple and Google voice recognition

    Wireless

    A booming industry based entirely on missed calls helped bring India online — and vanished overnight – Rest of World – Kumar’s friends and family members began ringing each other but hanging up before being charged for a call; the resulting missed-call alerts functioned as a kind of code between them. “It was decided in advance,” Kumar says. “We would say, if I’m coming to pick you up, I’ll give you a missed call, and you come out of your house.” 

    Leaving missed calls in this way — effectively using a mobile phone as a kind of latter-day pager — was a consumer hack that, in the 2000s, before India’s cheap smartphone and data revolution, grew more popular than texting. The missed call emerged in India as a critical means of communication for those who counted every rupee spent on recharge credit. But the practice soon spread, became trendy, and, even as call rates plunged in the 2000s to among the lowest in the world, evolved into a general tool of convenience: a missed call could mean “I miss you,” “Call me back,” or “I’m here.” The fact that the missed call demanded only basic numeric literacy made them accessible to the third of India’s population that was illiterate. In 2008, one study estimated that more than half of Indian phone users were in the habit of calling people with the expectation that they wouldn’t pick up – you had similar consumer patterns around the world, but Indians seem to have taken it to a new level