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.

  • Google Hangouts + more news

    Google Hangouts

    Google Hangouts breaks out on its own site | TechRadar – dismantling Google+ piece-by-piece literally with the Google Hangouts service. Google+ has been a failure for user adoption; even if they did benefit from the enrichment of search data. Whether Google Hangouts will remain, who knows?

    Consumer behaviour

    China is two-speed consumer market | warc.com – high speed and low speed consumers – These high speed households, consisting mostly of the urban middle-class, currently number 81m people and generate $1.7tr of the $3.2tr in total urban consumption, but their numbers will swell to 142m by 2020 when they will account for $3.8tr of the $5.6bn in total urban consumption. – high speed consumption is crucial to China moving to balance its dependence on exports. More China related posts here.

    Tinder and Hookup-Culture Promotion | Vanity Fair – is this really that different from the traditional meat market approach?

    Culture

    HAVE BRITS ABANDONED RAVE CULTURE? | DJMag – Newsbeat was probably the wrong format to do the report from

    How to

    How Long to Read – find how long it will take to read any book

    Luxury

    Ritz-Carlton, Naples shares a slice of pie on social media | Luxury Daily – being useful, smart social play

    Luxury Hotels Move Into Low-Touch Luxury | L2 Think Tank – thinking carefully about process and the use of digital

    Media

    Channel Mum looks ahead after ITV takes a stake | digiday – ITV investing in YouTube content

    Online

    Is Bing Trolling Google & Alphabet With ABC.WTF Redirect? – looks like some prankster punk’d Alphabet

    Retailing

    China’s Ecommerce Giant JD.Com Expands to Russia | SocialBrandWatch – just because Russia is under western sanctions doesn’t mean that the Chinese won’t go there. Chinese tourists are already driving much of the demand for luxury goods at GUM and other high end shopping destinations in Moscow. I would imagine Logistics across Russia would likely prove to be challenging. More on retailing here.

    Wireless

    Smartphone giants have lost 15,000 jobs to cheap Android phones this year | Quartz – commoditisation belting the life out of the market. Premium smartphones won’t go away but low market handsets and mid-market will likely converge

    Intel Said to Unseat Q’Com in iPhone | EE Times – Qualcomm has the best modem technology in the market and the iPhone 6S is a premium phone. I can’t see Apple settling for second best technology – will Intel have the IP and the staying power to match Qualcomm? If Intel history is anything to go by; Qualcomm is likely to emerge victorious over time

  • Ice Cube and other things that caught my eye this week

    Ice Cube appearing in a video for Vanity Fair, critiquing interpretations of NWA lyrics on Rap Genius. Its great the way Ice Cube handles it with such good humour.