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.

  • Luxxury I wanna be everything & other things

    Luxxury has released a new track I wanna be everything. Luxxury has the expansive feel of post-disco, pre-house uptempo dance music a la Shep Pettibone, the Latin Rascals and Arthur Baker. More related content here. Luxxury I wanna be everything is digital only.

    A YouTube video on the history of Unix. Now before you roll your eyes and move on to another site. Think about the ubiquity of unix. Key parts of the internet run on Unix. It’s also the reason why URLs and email addresses aren’t case sensitive. Most telecoms equipment runs on Unix or an analogue of the operating system.  I am writing this on a Mac, the core of the operating system is based on BSD – a variant of Unix. If you’re using Windows 10; it owes a lot to VMS – an operating system developed as a Unix analogue in the early and mid 1970s by Digital Equipment Corporation.

    As for Linux; it was originally developed because Linus Torvalds didn’t realise he could download a free version of BSD…. Linux now powers Android smartphones, smart televisions and all of the internet of things stuff that poses a huge security risk in your home. In terms of a written thing; Unix must be right up there with the works of Shakespeare or JRR Tolkien in terms of its importance in the modern world.

    The presentation also puts a bit of personality into what could have been quite a dry subject.

    I found this on Core 77; Nestle posted some epic videos from its Japanese Kit Kat factory. I love the enthusiasm of the presenters in their workwear as they take you through the manufacturing line: K. Kohno and H. Matsumoto are stars. Japanese Kit Kat is not the same as the sad loser biscuits that you pick up in your weekly shop. Instead they are beautifully packaged and come in a constantly changing variety of flavours like cherry blossom or green matcha tea. The process itself is beautiful to watch. In particular look at the packaging automation.

    The New York Times made a lot of allegations about Facebook and its reaction to Russian election tampering. Scott Galloway was on had to do TV interviews that poured petrol on the fire.

    Great video on Johnny Cash’s live concert At Folsom Prison. It is up there with Live at San Quentin also by Johnny Cash.

  • Walter Cronkite & things from last week

    US newsreader Walter Cronkite narrates a 1967 programme on what the future held in the 21st century. The soothing voice of Walter Cronkite makes the future look less scary

    An Unknown Enemy is a Mexican series on Amazon Prime that follows the rise of Fernando Barrientos, Head of the National Security Directorate, Mexico’s Secret Police in the late 1960s

    Panasonic helps workers create their own head space with new crowdfunded device | The Japan Times – the design looks hokey, but it mirrors the transformation of offices with hot desking and always on headphone culture to try and provide distance. More design related content here.

    The People’s Republic of Desire documents China’s online streaming culture that has developed over the past few years. The film financed by the Ford Foundation provides an inside view of the direction interaction between personalities and their audience. Young girls become online personalities funded directly by besotted fans. More interaction happens online than in real life. Of course, all this happens under the ever-seeing eye of the Chinese government.

    https://youtu.be/auHtqCJV4Rw

    Super-excited by an album of Smith & Mighty’s unreleased back catalogue from 1988 – 1994 being released this week. It is available via digital channels, double vinyl album and on compact disc. While the tracks were unreleased, there is no filler tracks in the collection, the quality is all top notch. Here is a taster.

    Have a great weekend.

  • The buzz of an emergent community

    I was chatting with a friend who was evangelic in their description of the emergent community on the AltSpace VR (virtual reality) social network They had met great friends, the kind of meaningful interactions that seldom occurs on your Facebook wall now.

    But was this about the power of VR? My take was that it is a minor factor at best. VR acted as a filter, it brought similar likeminded early adopters together. In many respects this mirrored other technology filters: the early days of dial up bulletin board services (particularly in the US with free local calls on the Bell network carriers),  AOL and CompuServe chat rooms or the Usenet.

    Filipino community gathering under the HSBC building

    The power of connecting likeminded people can be a transformative experience in the minds of participants.

    If I think back before my time on the internet, my friend’s experience in the emergent community of AltSpace sounded like the people I met at the Hacienda. It sounded like the experience of many of the regulars at acid house club Shoom – which was hosted by Danny Rampling out of a small gym in South London.

    These experiences are once lived, often never recaptured experiences rather like being on a school or college sports team. They only exist for a fleeting moment in time.

    It was like being an early member on Flickr, or my friend Ian’s experience on CompuServe chat rooms (where he met his future wife).

    So what makes these communities special?

    • Likeminded people who are likely to share a certain amount of norms and have common grounds to be there
    • A relatively small number of people. This number becomes inexact. In a good nightclub it would be a certain amount of exclusivity because not everyone knew it was there, rather than a strict door policy. The strict door policy is usually a remedial item done once the norms try and break down
    • Agreement to a set of common behaviours, for many years a common etiquette held sway on networks like Flickr. Facebook doesn’t have this except in tightly managed private groups

    So what happens to these communities?

    • A number soldier on, particularly around passion points such as Harry Potter books / films / games
    • A small minority (cough, cough) Facebook for example transcend their community and turn into a utility with pockets of interest hidden in secret
    • Things move on. Think about restaurants or nightclubs that are now sites of investment properties in London or Manchester

    About the photo: I took this on an early trip to Hong Kong. Every Sunday the Filipino and Indonesian communities would gather in different parts of the city to see friends, eat, sing, dance and trade items. This picture is of Filipinos,  taken in the private public space under the HSBC building in the Central district. Some years later this was a site for the Occupy Central protesters.

  • Death Notice by Zhou Haohui

    China has had a run in English literature at the moment. Cixin Liu has overturned the world of science fiction with his Three Body Problem trilogy of books. Zhou Haohui’s Death Notice promises a similar shake up in crime fiction.

    Death Notice

    Death Notice takes place in 2002, the internet was changing Chinese society and the government hadn’t yet rolled out a consistent approach to online services and content. You had the first generation of Chinese internet giants, Google was available to trawl content worldwide. The world was your oyster if you were curious enough and had sufficient English skills. Forums were transformative, attracting participants who shared a passion to connect in ways previously impossible within China.

    It was also a more open time in terms of the government’s attitude to public freedom and discourse. The book is set before the implementation of Golden Shield project, which started to censor Chinese access to the web. The Golden Shield project also helps shape online consumer opinion through content deletion on social platforms and gaming trending items. Which is why it is the ideal time to set a complex serial killer that relies on the internet. It is also a China that longer exists. I was surprised that the book has been published and lauded in China as it begs comparison with the less open Xi regime.

    The death notice of the title refers to a crowdsourced list of wrongdoers who escaped justice and end up being dispatched in creative ways. I don’t want to say any more that would give away more of the plot.

    Death Notice leads you on a twisted exploration of who the killer could be, dragging in to suspicion even members of the investigative team. And this is apparently the first in a series of books. If you enjoy Scandinavian fiction like Jo Nesbo and Stieg Larsson, then Zhou Haohui offers something that provides a similar sense of innovation in crime literature. More books reviewed here.

  • The Sacco Gang by Andrea Camilleri

    The Sacco Gang is an easy to read dramatisation of a true story about a family in Sicily during the rise of fascism. Andrea Camilleri is better known as the author of the Montalbano series of crime novels. With The Sacco Gang Camilleri takes the original source material about the Sacco family and then filled in the spaces to provide clarity to the narrative.

    The Sacco’s were a family on the rise in Sicily. They got their advantage through a mix hard work and good luck. They realised when it was luck rather than convincing themselves that it was their won skill. The Sacco’s  managed to move above the hand-to-mouth existence of indentured farm labourers; a common existence in pre-war Sicily.  Sicilian society was essentially feudal in nature, grinding poverty and injustice gave rise to the mafia and allowed it to turn into something malignant.

    The family’s deeply ingrained sense of natural justice meant that they were not going to give into the mafia’s attempt to ‘tax’ the family back into poverty. Their socialist leanings meant that the family also became targets for the fascist government, even as they crushed the Sicilian mafia.

    Camilleri wraps this all up in a small very easy-to-read novelette. More book reviews here.