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.

  • Granny’s Got Talent

    Granny’s Got Talent – The Korean Cultural Centre has a fortnightly screening of films. The latest one that I went to was Granny’s Got Talent or 헬머니 (pronounced Helmeoni – a literal translation would be Hell Granny).

    The premise is built around an old woman who is released from jail. She lost contact with her eldest son and tries to build that connection whilst living with her youngest son. The eldest son is a salary man with an over-bearing set of rich in-laws. The youngest son an inveterate gambler. To bail the youngest son out of trouble she participates in a Korean reality TV show based around cursing and chaos ensues. Veteran Korean actress carries off the role of Hell Granny with aplomb. I laughed so hard at some points I ended up crying.

    The raucous bawdy humour of Granny’s Got Talent works despite subtitles and has some amazing comedic set-pieces. But this rudeness is only the top layer in the story, where the viewer gets a glimpse at the hard life a strong woman had to live in a fast-developing South Korea.

    The film works on a number of levels touching a number of distinctly  Korean themes including the obsession with hierarchy, its turbulent political past, the corrupt aspects of chaebols and the love of family (no matter how dysfunctional).

    The piece that British audiences will most relate to is the exploitative nature of reality TV formats. Something that the English title translation picked up, rather than going with a literal translation of the Korean ‘Hell Granny’. ‘Hell Granny’ as a title focuses on the profanity. When I was young someone who swore or used bawdy language was said to have the mouth of a washer woman – a low class blue collar job. For more Korea related posts, go here.

    More Information
    Movie page on Daum in Korean

  • On Writing

    This post was prompted by reading A Time To Write by Wadds, open it in a new tab on your browser and give it a read.
    Cover on my old book
    Given Wadds’ post I thought I would reflect briefly on my own process.

    Why I write?

    Wadds describes his writing as a kind of mindfulness.  For me writing serves a number of purposes:

    • It cements things in my memory, a bit like revision at school
    • It helps me work out ideas and my stance on them
    • Its a good platform for experiments. I started off my blogging to work out how it could help clients that I couldn’t get media coverage for. This was back before social media was a thing. At the moment I am using this blog  as part of an experiment on LinkedIn Pulse as a source of traffic. More on that when I have a decent set of data
    • Occasionally decent conversations spark of these posts, some of my good friends are online
    • There is a more talented fighter than I, also called Ged Carroll. I like to have a clear differentiator from him
    • My blog is also a marketing calling card, I have got jobs from it over the years.

    Wadds talks about why people don’t write, he describes it as effort and bravery. I suspect its a bit more complex. Yes life does get in the way for many people, but many of my friends have their own creative outlets: painting, photography, the art of social conversation, mastering video games to name but three.  For me writing extends out of curiosity, it is a natural progression – otherwise ideas would vanish into the ether.

    In terms of bravery, Wadds talks about the willingness to share private or personal subjects. I generally don’t, the reason is quite simple. Growing up in an Irish household, my time was predominantly spent in the UK during The Troubles, I grew up with the idea of the pervasive, invasive surveillance state. I grew up with a personal perception of what could be called ‘operational security’ (Op-Sec). The future has finally caught up.

    Workflow

    You can break my workflow down into four sections:

    • Ideation.  Ideas broadly come from reading something or the world around me. If it is something on the world around me, I will make some bullets in the notes application of my iPhone.  If it is a talk I will have likely recorded it using Olympus’ free dictation app for the iPhone. If it is from reading a book, I am likely to put post-it notes on the relevant pages with some notes and then flick back through this as I write a post. I have aversion to writing on the books themselves. I have found that I don’t get much out of reading on a Kindle, so only use that for leisure reading now. If  I am inspired by something I have seen, there will be a picture on Flickr, which also serves as the image hosting platform for this blog. I have about 46 GB of images in my Flickr account – it would take a major tectonic event to persuade me to move to another platform like 500px. I have a Twitter account with a set of lists that provide inspiration and use Newsblur as an RSS reader as well. Newsblur is invaluable. I am currently trying Breaking News, an app recommended by Richard Edelman and occasionally dip into Apple’s own News app. When I have online content that has spurred a writing idea I will notate it in my bookmark service pinboard.in
    • Writing. My writing method varies based on two criteria; the regularity of the post and the length of the post. If you’ve read my blog for a length of time you will see that there are repeating themes. Every two days is a collection of interesting links from around the web. These posts are based on content that I bookmark. There is a post on Friday for interesting creative or useful things, again this pretty much writes itself based on my bookmarks as I ingest the web. At the moment I am publishing slides of data that I have collected on a monthly basis, I usually write a bit of analysis on the some of the data that I have surfaced. This just flows out easily. For short irregular posts they are often a stream of consciousness with minimal editing directly into WordPress. Longer posts are often mind-mapped onto engineering squared paper and then written into Hemingway
    • Editing. Unlike Wadds, I don’t have an editor. I use Hemingway app as a machine-based editor. My fact-checking happens before words are committed to the posts in my reading around
    • Syndication. I syndicate my content using plumbing that I have put int place using IFTTT and WordPress’ own JetPack plug-in. When I syndicate to Medium and LinkedIn this is done manually.

    Wadds’ talks about mindfulness in writing. I don’t necessarily think that its the same for me.  That feeling of being in the zone is something I get more from DJ’ing ironically, or focusing on a mundane task. Writing is more about making fleeting ideas permanent. It is also written with at least half an eye on my work.

    More information
    Olympus Dictation app
    Flickr
    Newsblur
    Twitter lists
    pinboard.in
    Breaking News app
    IFTTT
    JetPack
    Medium

  • Monster internet surveillance + more

    Britain to pay billions for monster internet surveillance network | DuncanCampbell.org – lets park the moral dilemma this represents for a moment, would other countries come to the UK for expertise in terms of how to implement this locally? What countries would they be? What would the optics be on it? Who are the contractors that are likely to benefit from this work in the UK? More on security related issues here.

    I think it will be pretty hard to make lemonade out of these lemons. The business opportunity probably won’t scale to get a ‘space race’ type benefit, the likely client countries may pose problems in terms of optics. After Snowden, you can count out the EU territories. An obvious contractor to benefit would likely be Huawei (mix of telecoms and enterprise tech, fast growing player in enterprise storage) – who wouldn’t need British expertise to sell this monster internet surveillance solution abroad

    Let’s Talk About Amazon Reviews: How We Spot the Fakes | The Wirecutter – Although many reviews on Amazon are legitimate, more and more sketchy companies are turning to compensated Amazon reviews to inflate star ratings and to drum up purchases

    jenny odell • living a designed life – interesting essay on the rendered spaces used by developers in their sales pitches

    Samsung 837 – JWT Intelligence – really interesting retail space

    Italian Crime Series Gomorrah Kills Pornhub Traffic – Pornhub Insights – the power of mainstream media played out online, I am sure there would be a similar dip for something like Game of Thrones or the FA Cup Final in the US and UK respectively

    WPP Mobile New technology service from Maxus makes marketing as easy as Pie – gives WPP a bigger arbitrage opportunity but if you were a large client wouldn’t you be demanding similar implementation times?

    MSN Ceases Chinese Operations | ChnaTechNews – and that’s the last of the western portals when went there leaving the market

    CK Hutchison mulls legal challenge as EC thwarts its UK ambitions | TotalTele.com – not terribly surprising. UK Government’s big mistake was allowing BT to acquire a cellular operator again

    Misused English Words and Expressions in EU Publications – European Court of Auditors – Secretariat General Translation Directorate – fascinating document that explains why English speakers may feel exasperated at times with their EU counterparts

    Xiaomi faces existential crisis | Techinasia – if it loses the Chinese middle classes, it loses the opportunity to sell its eco-system of smart home products to them

  • Millennials are people too

    Smart funny video by Adam Conover on the marketing obsession of millennials as a form of segmentation.

    Show this to as many marketers as you can.

    Having been involved in youth marketing and even spoken at conferences about it, many of the challenges and insights that ‘millennials’ as a cohort face aren’t unique insights per se.

    You hear the same things over-and-over again. Being young presents its own set of challenges, these are tweaked accelerated by environmental conditions such as economy and housing. You feel the injustices of the world, adulting is hard. Responsibilities have a weight to them. Education has a cost.

    Getting your first home is hard. Finding the right partner is stressful. Since the baby boomers the concept of youth has become elongated. The whole of society hasn’t been drafted into fighting a war and benefited from the rise of the industrial society.

    But that doesn’t mean that it makes much sense for marketers to talk about millennials in such a broad brush way. At least gen-X whilst been written off as slackers were realised to have various different sub-cultures or tribes.

    That level of nuance seems to have disappeared in ‘our’ collective understanding of millennials and gen-Z.

    While we’re on about nuance, since when do adverts aimed at baby boomers appreciate that they don’t all look like Helen Mirren or Joanna Lumley. Or that they like going to rock concerts and festivals? Or that they might run for health and leisure?

    Marketers are increasingly looking at big data, but lacking granularity in terms of segmentation and factors that might influence brand relevance.

    My hypothesis is that the fetishisation of millennials as a single cohort is down to a deeper seated fear of disruption ambushing the marketers. Millennials aren’t an alien invasion, but people just like we’re used to. This fetishisation will end up as a feedback loop distorting their own view of what they expect to be and how they expect to be seen.

    More on millennial related topics here.

  • Chinese industrial decline + more

    Chinese industrial decline – It is hard to explain to people the diversity of China. If you’ve followed China as a subject area you’re used to discussions around tier one to six cities. We tend to buy into ‘Blade Runner’ China because its the tier one and two cities that you end up visiting. Its pretty much the same with the media. I really like this New York Times documentary that deals with the slowdown of heavy industry in Northern China and apparel manufacturing in Guangzhou province in the South.

    Chinese industrial decline in this documentary shows off it’s rust belt and left behind areas. This city’s mayor and is project is a microcosm of the efforts going on.

    China has been in a constant state of reinvention. I worked out of old electronics factories in Shenzhen that had been turned into offices and creative studios, with Shoreditch style retail attached. Whilst, Shenzhen is famous for manufacturing, the reality now is more complex. It has a thriving finance sector that China hopes will eclipse Hong Kong.

    Further up the Pearl river delta cities like Dongguan were industrialised by Hong Kong entrepreneurs and became crucial parts of the global fashion supply chain. Here too changes is happening, areas of Dongguan are being repurposed as tech campuses. Huawei built their ‘European theme park’ campus there. Of course, the unskilled workers get replaced. They move further inland along with some of the industry.

    Some of the industry, has moved abroad. China has become too expensive and onerous to deal with. In the North, heavy industry was built at break neck speed relatively close to coal fields, rather like the UK during the industrial revolution. During this go-go time China could use or export all the steel old. After the 2008 Olympics China started aiming for more sustainable growth and heroic efforts became surplus production.

    A Brazilian flavoured tune as a free download Oya’ Indebure feat. Laudir de Oliveira | DJ Nu-Mark. However, don’t mistake free, for low quality, this is an amazing tune. More on DJ Nu-Mark here.

    Maybe a team up with Scanner would have been more appropriate but liking Jean-Michel Jarre + Edward Snowden – ‘Exit’

    May the 4th aka Star Wars day saw geeks dominate the web, I did really like Japanese airline ANA’s rendition of the Star Wars theme purely from aircraft related found sounds

    TBWA in Amsterdam pulled together these clever DJ controller place mats for McDonalds. It shows how much is now possible with printed circuits. I love the combination of material smarts and  creativity.