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.

  • Ronnie Drew & things this week

    Listening to the late, great Ronnie Drew telling the story of Cú Chulainn. Cú Chulainn is one of the most famous figures in Irish folklore and Drew’s ravaged voice adds much to the telling.

    Ronnie Drew was the leader and vocalist in Irish group The Dubliners. In attitude, The Dubliners were more rock n’ roll than rock n’ roll. The Dubliners were famous for their version of McAlpine’s Fusiliers and The Black Velvet Band. Ronnie Drew and The Dubliners were influential to  The Pogues and Dropkick Murphys.

    My parents view of them is more ambiguous. They were jackeens or city dwellers, which they thought was incongruous with Irish traditional music, which was kept alive in the countryside. Secondly, their drinking was seen to be a stereotype reinforcing cliche. They looked more like university students rather than turning up in a nice suit and tie, which was seen as disgraceful.

    Ronnie Drew and the rest of The Dubliners love of their culture and stories comes out in their recordings. More related content here.

    Nice bit of pop songwriting with Twin Shadow

    I’ve been listening to Audio Books on YouTube as higher brow background noise Free Audio Books for Intellectual Exercise – YouTube – YouTube

    Buffer is now allowing for direct scheduling of Instagram posts. Its a bit of a kludge. I tried it this week and it worked really well.

    You can write the post on the desktop version of Buffer, but you have to do a number of things:

    • Have mobile notifications set up on the Buffer iPhone app and Instagram
    • Set your Instagram account up with a business account (this includes pairing with a brand page on Facebook)

    As far as I can tell the Buffer mobile app then publishes to your Instagram mobile app at the scheduled time. But that’s the kind of BS you have to go through with Instagram’s restrictive APIs that it has to try and ensure it is the source platform for all graphic posts.

    My next step is to see if this kludge will help me auto-post from Flickr to Instagram…

    Matt Farah goes over the oligarch-like relationship of the Swiss watch industry – Episode 10: The Watchmaking Family Tree – YouTube

  • Technology uncanny valley of the web

    The technology sector is in a maelstrom.

    Strange Magicks

    Cambridge Analytica

    Whilst Cambridge Analytica surprised most people in digital marketing who get the technology. The claims surprised for three main reasons:

    • Facebook’s scope of data access wasn’t surprising to marketers, but the level of shock the media felt was seismic
    • Cambridge Analytica was considered to have some mythical secret sauce by the media. Those marketers close to the political scene were surprised. How was Cambridge Analytica thought effective?
    • The media have avoided discussing the advertising technology that underpins modern online media. This creates richer data profiles and improves media targeting. Unfortunately this technology runs on their website, analysing their traffic, vending their advertising
    ‘Supernatural’ technology

    I caught up with a friend who had recently upgraded the operating system on their Mac laptop and iPhone. They made a restaurant booking and were surprised when the web site ‘knew who they were’. and automatically completed their information. Then, on the day of the booking a notification popped up. It said that they should leave now as there was moderate traffic.

    They ascribed all this magic to the the website ‘knowing’ everything about them. I explained to them that this was their Apple products trying to be helpful rather than dialing their anxiety levels to 11.

    People are powerless

    There is an assumption amongst the general public that technology has supernatural powers.

    It makes them uncomfortable, but they feel powerless in the face of it. This discomfort reminded me of the ‘uncanny valley’ experienced with humanoid robots. For the rest of consumer there is latent inertia. They will generally put up with a lot of discomfort.

    They realise at a base level that The Technium is – . They don’t realise how they should adapt to it.

    The technium is a superorganism of technology. It has its own force that it exerts. That force is part cultural (influenced by and influencing of humans), but it’s also partly non-human, partly indigenous to the physics of technology itself.

    It’s just the way things are. Consumer actions won’t make a difference. #deletefacebook will barely make a dent and that’s what’s scariest of all. More related issues here.

    More information

    The Technium and the 7th kingdom of life | Edge.org

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  • Yahoos and things this week

    Catching up with fellow former Yahoos. Employees of Yahoo! were known as Yahoos. All three of us worked on the European marketing team in London at the time when web 2.0 was kicking off. It was great to see my fellow former Yahoos. We kicked around the move away from quality in online media, historic ‘pirated television reception’ in Ireland, the worrying state of brand marketing and new ventures. If you are looking for high-quality male grooming products Charles has been working on Scrubd.

    tres Yahoo! deliquentes

    Andrew Tuck tells the Monocle story on the Mediamasters podcast. Really interesting origin story – what’s interesting is the contrarian thinking of Tyler Brûlé. Monocle is notable for building a print magazine in the face of a digital onslaught of media. More media related content here.

    Great interview with Roger Smith about the wonders of mechanical watch.

    Smith worked with Dr. George Daniels who invented the co-axial movement which has been a major step forward in mechanical watch making – changing the way power is delivered that is more efficient and can improve accuracy.

    Smith is exceptionally articulate about the technical differences of the different watches from high accuracy quartz watches to classic Rolex and Omega movements.

    Antonio Da Silva’s Hell’s Night where famous film characters interact in one night club stunned me when I saw it a few years ago. In the meantime he did a sequel and has had time to work on the colour grading of the video to make it even more mesmerising.

    Hell’s Club

    Hell’s Club Two

    Finally I am surprised that this was something I hadn’t heard already – what if the late great Terry Wogan had listened to Skibadee or MC GQ vintage mixtapes and Rinse FM? Peter Serafiniwicz channels The TWOG$.

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  • Roxanne Shante + more

    The new Roxanne Shante biopic looks amazing and you know the soundtrack is going to be good. Roxanne Shante was like a breadth of fresh air in the early rap scene. She had an amazing technique and was well able to cut male competitors down to size. Roxanne Shante is a legend despite her limited profile.

    Dr. Penelope Boston: “Seeking the Tricorder: The Hunt for Extraterrestrial Life” | Talks at Google – YouTube – interesting challenges in terms of identification, methodology and analysis. The trial-corder like the Star Trek communicator has been inspiring technologists for decades. More on innovation here.

    The South China Morning Post have launched a news site for an international audience focused on the Chinese technology sector – Abacus. Given the amount of blogs that used to cover the China tech sector that have disappeared, this is a welcome addition. Its a nice looking site, it has great interactive design and a good editorial team. My one complaint is that it doesn’t have an RSS feed which is a real bummer.

    Unsupported | The Greatest Stories Retold – interesting attempts at really short form storytelling. It doesn’t work well in Safari as a web browser. Something to provide creative inspiration for those 15 second ad spot scripts.

    Re-evaluating Media is a piece of research put together that tried to rebalance expectations on more traditional media. Whilst there was room to land meaningful points (TV is better at mass reach for a given CPM), and there is an argument to be made for a media neutral approach where the media mix fits the communications problem to be solved. Instead they made bigger leaps and had a methodology that was optimistic at best – this became the focus of debate among people that I knew. There are arguments to be made about the wider role of brand building which would better help traditional broadcast advertising more.

  • Techmeme ride home & other things this week

    Techmeme ride home podcast

    Techmeme Ride Home by Techmeme on Apple Podcasts – nice summary of the biggest stories in the tech sector on a 15 minute podcast. Techmeme started as a tech focused news aggregator, but this Techmeme ride home podcast is really handy to listen to on my commute. 

    FK Twigs x Spike Jonze

    HomePod — Welcome Home by Spike Jonze — Apple – FKA Twigs dances along in a mind bending video that’s part LSD trip and part old time Hollywood musical. Just a shame that its advertising the Apple HomePod. More related content here.

    Stephen Hawking Voice Generator (play/download) ― LingoJam – kind of like the Speak n Spell you had when you were a kid but more adaptable. Hawking came to view his voice generator as part of his personality. When it was glitching out at the end of its natural life, a tremendous effort was put into replicating its sound for Hawking. The story in itself says a lot about how we relate to technology.

    Let’s Go Twitter – I haven’t watched a film at the cinema in a while so am probably way late to this creative. I ended up being really confused by this advert. Visually, its a feast for the eyes, but still confusing. I love Twitter but good lord do they honestly think that advertising will solve what they seem to have diagnosed as a UX issue in on boarding for a new account?

    Supermarket chain REWE empowered shoppers to choose the sugar content of its own-brand chocolate pudding. During the campaign, REWE distributed puddings that had 20%, 30%, and 40% less sugar alongside its original formula; the favorite formula (30% won!) will be permanently available for sale at the supermarket. Of course, one could say that there is a bias in the survey design, but this idea of co-creation and a transparent discussion about sugar is a welcome change. via Trendwatching.