Ged Carroll

Category: media | 媒體 | 미디어 | メディア

It makes sense to start this category with warning. Marshall McLuhan was most famous for his insight – The medium is the message: it isn’t just the content of a media which matters, but the medium itself which most meaningfully changes the ways humans operate.

But McLuhan wasn’t an advocate of it, he saw dangers beneath the surface as this quote from his participation in the 1976 Canadian Forum shows.

“The violence that all electric media inflict in their users is that they are instantly invaded and deprived of their physical bodies and are merged in a network of extensions of their own nervous systems. As if this were not sufficient violence or invasion of individual rights, the elimination of the physical bodies of the electric media users also deprives them of the means of relating the program experience of their private, individual selves, even as instant involvement suppresses private identity. The loss of individual and personal meaning via the electronic media ensures a corresponding and reciprocal violence from those so deprived of their identities; for violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.”

McLuhan was concerned with the mass media, in particular the effect of television on society. Yet the content is atemporal. I am sure the warning would have fitted in with rock and roll singles during the 1950s or social media platforms today.

I am concerned not only changes in platforms and consumer behaviour but the interaction of those platforms with societal structures.

  • Fractured tech lobby + more things

    The fractured tech lobby’s uphill battles – Axios – The fractured tech lobby is a sign of too many firms working at cross purposes. – The Internet Association was founded almost a decade ago to be Silicon Valley’s voice in Washington. But now its biggest members — companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon — increasingly bump heads as they each seek to channel policymakers’ fury away from themselves, and they can have wildly different goals from smaller members. Facebook, for instance, has signaled that it’s open to new federal laws introducing privacy regulations and modest updates to Section 230, tech’s liability shield. Smaller companies worry giants could handle the burden of complying while they’d struggle to survive. – The fractured tech lobby is going to offer a bounty for law firms and K Street lobbyists. It will also open up investigations around the world from the EU to Seoul, Korea. China won’t be involved since it blocks most of the key members of the Internet Association – the fractured tech lobby in question.

    The Kremlin’s Anti-Western (and Remarkably Successful) Middle East Media Project | Interpreter magazine – Dr. Naila Hamdy, an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at the American University in Cairo, noted how “RT may have filled up that gap” left in Egypt and the wider region following the Arab Spring, when an increasing number of viewers began to see Al-Jazeera as closely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties. This increasing regional polarization erupted in the summer of 2017 with the Saudi-led embargo of Qatar, with Saudi and its Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) partners demanding the closure of Al Jazeera as punishment for Qatar’s alleged support for the Brotherhood, as well as Iran and its regional Shiite proxies

    The Radicalization of Kevin Greeson — ProPublica – interesting article and an under-covered subject. The flpside of this article is how the Democrats have lost their base in these communities and it reminds me a lot of how Labour lost its base outside the major cities in that respect. They no longer represent working people, but are instead considered to be playing identity politics, the economics of new-liberalism is largely universal

    China’s rich spent US$54 billion at home on luxury goods last year with coronavirus halting overseas trips | South China Morning Post 

    From Dialect to Grapholect: Written Cantonese from a folkloristic Viewpoint by Chin Wan-kan Hong Kong Policy Research Institute Ltd. – fascinating white paper on Cantonese culture and language. What becomes apparent is that Beijing’s adoption of Mandarin demonstrates its inability to decolonise its culture, by taking the language of the Manchu people who conquered the Han people and others. (PDF) More China related content here.

    Sony takes wraps off secret Unreal Engine project, unveils new subsidiary: Sony Immersive Music Studios – Music Business Worldwide 

    Unilever workers will never return to desks full-time, says boss | Working from home | The Guardian – to be honest with you, this was the way Unilever operated with its hot desking policies way before COVID-19. Global headquarters 100VE had way less seats, phones, desk space and meeting rooms than were needed

    Xi encourages Starbucks to help promote China-U.S. ties – Xinhua | English.news.cn – one has to ask where is the line that executives from businesses like Starbucks and Goldman Sachs cross to be viewed as foreign agents in the US due to their relationship with the Chinese government

    Sheryl Sandberg downplayed Facebook’s blame for Capitol riot, but evidence points to role – The Washington Post – Fliers and hashtags promoting the pro-Trump rally circulated on Facebook and Instagram in the days and weeks beforehand

    Ad Aged: Standing up for truth. (Haha.) – For a society or an industry to function it needs to have a set of common facts. It’s really that simple. If you hear an assertion, ask for evidence. Whether or not you agree with it. If you make an assertion, be prepared to back it up with a piece of paper.

    WhatsApp fights back as users flee to Signal and Telegram | Financial Times – The encrypted messaging app, which has more than 2bn users globally, and several of its senior executives spent Tuesday trying to clarify forthcoming privacy policy changes covering the data that can be shared between WhatsApp and its parent now that it is deepening its push into ecommerce. Signal was downloaded 8.8m times worldwide in the week after the WhatsApp changes were first announced on January 4, versus 246,000 times the week before, according to data from Sensor Tower. The app also got a boost when Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, tweeted “Use Signal” on January 7.  By contrast, WhatsApp recorded 9.7m downloads in the week after the announcement, compared with 11.3m before, a 14 per cent decrease

    Detained US lawyer urges Hong Kong to look to Ireland for inspiration | Financial Times – Look at Irish history . . . They were completely hopeless for so long, but eventually they got part of Ireland — they got a republic,” Mr Clancey told the Financial Times. “In a difficult situation we shouldn’t just give up and have no hope for the future.” Mr Clancey was still asleep when police arrived to detain him last Wednesday. After his arrest, police escorted Mr Clancey, a Hong Kong permanent resident, to his office to conduct a search. His firm, headed by veteran lawyer Albert Ho, is known for representing anti-government activists. His arrest has stirred fears authorities will target lawyers in Hong Kong who represent opposition figures in political cases — a tactic common in mainland China

    Chinese freight platform to raise more cash on huge investor demand | Financial Times – investor frenzy bidding seven times the amount that Didi Chuxing was looking for when doing a capital round for its freight business

  • Christmas songs and other things that caught my eye this week

    Cheddar put together an interesting study into popular Christmas songs. I really like that Cheddar put their sources including The Wall Street Journal and other news sources. I’d love to see more people do this on YouTube videos. The start of popular Christmas songs took off with recording music and the move away from religious music to a more secular family festival celebrated in America.

    As the clock ticked down to Brexit finally happening, I watched the late Darcus Howe’s three part series White Tribe using the All4 service. Looking back two decades, you could see effects of the Thatcher administration which accelerated the decline of the British industrial heartland without thinking about what came next beyond shopping malls, loft apartments and garden festivals. The schism in society that fuelled Brexit was readily apparent. The void of what being English meant, was again apparent during the head-scratching paean to the NHS that was the London Olympics opening ceremony. What I thought was most remarkable is that White Tribe is very consistent with what I saw in John Harris’ series for the Guardian Anywhere but Westminster. All of it in retrospectYou can watch the full series of White Tribe here.

    In common with other organisations from design agencies to the Irish government’s department of foreign affairs; Japanese airline ANA celebrated Christmas with a content focus this year DO: Bring Japanese Christmas Home ‘Tis the season… – ANA. The content is unusual as it focuses on secular Japanese Christmas traditions including Christmas songs. More Japan related content here. 

  • CD ROM history + more news

    CD ROM reflections

    How “God Makes God” is a 1993 CD ROM about probability, game theory, genetic algorithms, and evolutionary strategies | Boing Boing – I remember having my mind blown by this CD ROM at college. It reminded me of Jostein Gaarder’s book Sophie’s World in terms of its approach to making philosophy entertaining and accessible. I remember reading Sophie’s World around the same time as having played How God Makes God. There was something about HyperCard and the CD ROM authoring tools that followed. Amidst all the brochureware there were creators who drove extraordinary media projects, most notably for me was the game Myst, which I don’t think has been bettered. I suspect part of it was the excitement of new ‘hyper-media’, the limitations of the tools (though 640MB storage at the time seemed vast when I was using an Apple PowerBook 165 with 4MB of RAM and an 80MB hard drive at the time) and the media economics of the time. CD-ROM authoring tools were becoming more sophisticated. CD manufacturing plants were proliferating, lowering the cost per CD ROM disk and CD recordable drives were relatively affordable in the price range of $10,000 – $20,000. Still eye wateringly expensive, but this was a vast improvement from just two years before and allowed for better prototyping, small production runs and testing across devices.

    Design

    3D printed IKEA hack experiences by Uppgradera on Etsy – really interesting aspects to the designs

    Ethics

    Instacart Is a Parasite and a Sham | The New Republic – The gig economy company, like many of its peers, has seen business skyrocket during the pandemic—while exploiting workers and even failing to turn a profit. That last bit reminds me a lot of the first generation dot com companies who tried to break through the wall of economics and succeed by moving at internet speed. This time they seem to have supplemented the usual ‘throw money at it’ approach with a lack of morality

    Ideas

    How Claude Shannon’s Information Theory Invented the Future | Quanta Magazine – the idea of binary encrypted signals

    Innovation

    Activist Firm Urges Intel to ‘Explore Alternatives’ to Manufacturing Its Own Chips – ExtremeTech – there are national security issues with this. I suspect this is just an opening salvo by Dan Loeb

    Regulators tell Jack Ma’s Ant Group to rectify five problems – the five areas included: Ant’s inadequate governance; regulatory negligence; unlawful profit-seeking; monopolistic practices and; infringement of consumer rights, said China’s central bank vice governor Pan Gongsheng.

    China orders Ant Group to rein in unfettered expansion as regulators put up fences around financial risks | South China Morning Post – Ant must return to its origins in online payments and prohibit irregular competition, protect customers’ privacy in operating its personal credit rating business, establish a financial holding company to manage its businesses, rectify any irregularities in its insurance, wealth management and credit businesses, and run its asset-backed securities business in accordance with regulations, the People’s Bank of China’s deputy governor Pan Gongsheng said in a statement on Sunday.

    Luxury

    From TikTok to Depop: Fashion’s new trend funnel | Vogue Business – trends like leather, feathers, neutrals or hot pinks, were relatively easy to follow: the trend funnel moved from runway to rack, with some help from popular culture along the way. This year, Gen Z users on TikTok and Depop jumpstarted a new trend funnel, quickly giving rise to aesthetics like “cottagecore” and “dark academia”, influencing young shoppers’s purchases. “If one of your favourite [TikTok] creators changes their aesthetic due to a particular trend, a whole style can be born out of it,” says Yazmin How, TikTok’s content lead. “The fashion industry is no longer the only voice directing the new season’s trends. People are tapping into TikTok to see what emerging styles are ‘in’ and what previously popular trends are coming back around.” TikTok trends manifest into purchases on Depop, where 90 per cent of users are Gen Z. In step with the rise of the cottagecore trend on TikTok, search for the term on Depop rose 900 per cent between March to August, when it reached its peak. Greater connectivity and increased time at home has boosted the amount of these consumer-led movements, and brands whose aesthetics fit the trends are benefiting, like LoveShackFancy, who specialises in the prairie dresses and gingham blouses associated with cottagecore’s countryside aesthetic – reminds me a bit of the Harajuku trends from the past 30 years. Culture and the trends that come out of it, are now massively parallel in nature

    Online

    FarmVille Once Took Over Facebook. Now Everything Is FarmVille. – The New York Times – legacy is in growth hacking techniques used to make it popular in the first place

    Why Bella Poarch’s “M to the B” video was the top TikTok of 2020 – Vox – TikTok automates the mix of all these topics, going farther than any other platform to mimic the human editor.” At the same time, he says, it’s also “an eternal channel flip, and the flip is the point: there is no settled point of interes t to land on. Nothing is meant to sustain your attention.” The result, he argues, is what essentially amounts to “soft censorship,” or a feed that becomes as “glossy, appealing, and homogenous as possible rather than the truest reflection of either reality or a user’s desires.” How did a perfectly average competitive dancer become the No. 1 internet celebrity in the world? Why did half a billion people watch Poarch’s face bob up and down? Because these two women are the logical endpoint of the world’s most powerful entertainment algorithm: young people centering their conventional attractiveness in easily repeatable formats

    Retailing

    Amazon and the Rise of the Retail “Sniffer” Algorithm | The Fashion Law – the “sniffer algorithm” – or better yet, “one or more” sniffer algorithms that not only sniff out topics that a speaker is potentially interested in but that also “attempt to identify trigger words in the voice content, which can indicate a level of interest of the user.” For example, as Amazon’s patent application states, “A keyword that is repeated multiple times in a conversation might be given assigned a higher priority than other keywords, tagged with a priority tag.” At the same time, “a keyword following a ‘strong’ trigger word, such as ‘love’ might be given a higher priority or weighting than for an intermediate trigger word such as ‘purchased.’” – when does assistance become creepy?

    Security

    NSO used real people’s location data to pitch its contact-tracing tech, researchers say | TechCrunch – and here is the original report on which the article is based Nso Group’s Breach Of Private Data With ‘fleming’, A Covid-19 Contact-tracing Software ← Forensic Architecture 

    Insecure wheels: Police turn to car data to destroy suspects’ alibis | NBC News – investigators have realized that automobiles — particularly newer models — can be treasure troves of digital evidence. Their onboard computers generate and store data that can be used to reconstruct where a vehicle has been and what its passengers were doing. They reveal everything from location, speed and acceleration to when doors were opened and closed, whether texts and calls were made while the cellphone was plugged into the infotainment system, as well as voice commands and web histories. But that boon for forensic investigators creates fear for privacy activists, who warn that the lack of information security baked into vehicles’ computers poses a risk to consumers and who call for safeguards to be put in place

    Web of no web

    Tencent backs Chinese healthcare portal DXY in $500M round | TechCrunch – China has done a lot of work to move towards telemedicine and technology augmented health. Tencent’s WeChat was used by local governments for their COVID certificates, tracking and tracing applications. More Tencent related content here.

  • Plastic surgery hack + more

    Hackers threaten to leak plastic surgery pictures – BBC News – this follows on from the hack on Finnish mental health services. Given the link between plastic surgery and self image; black hat hackers have a lot of sustained leverage. More security related posts here.

    Regulators tell Jack Ma’s Ant Group to rectify five problems – the five areas included: Ant’s inadequate governance; regulatory negligence; unlawful profit-seeking; monopolistic practices and; infringement of consumer rights, said China’s central bank vice governor Pan Gongsheng. China orders Ant Group to rein in unfettered expansion as regulators put up fences around financial risks | South China Morning Post – Ant must return to its origins in online payments and prohibit irregular competition, protect customers’ privacy in operating its personal credit rating business, establish a financial holding company to manage its businesses, rectify any irregularities in its insurance, wealth management and credit businesses, and run its asset-backed securities business in accordance with regulations, the People’s Bank of China’s deputy governor Pan Gongsheng said in a statement on Sunday.

    Beijing launches antitrust investigation into Alibaba | FT – of course, its not political.

    Who’s behind Marcus Rashford? – UnHerd – interesting profile of Roc Nation’s UK arm

    SolarWinds Adviser Warned of Lax Security Years Before Hack – Bloomberg – I’d be surprised if there isn’t shareholder class action suits now

    The OnlyFans revolution – The Face – Selena suggests we ​“talk about OF in a way that doesn’t glamourise the economics of the operation”. Instead, we need a more ​“nuanced conversation about the nuts and bolts of what the actual labour looks like. We aren’t seeing the injustices. It’s either focused on our trauma or on the glamorous hyperbolic examples, while most of us are somewhere in the middle.”  There are many sides to running an OnlyFans that are less visible, including work that goes into maintaining a profile and the emotional labour involved in keeping up with fans. Historically, sex workers basically act as ad hoc therapists to their clients – it’s said to come with the territory, from escorting to camming to BDSM. And the ​“girlfriend experience” applies here too. A key part of the site’s success is one-to-one connection – often creators’ bios will explicitly state they talk with all their followers – for the right brands there is an opportunity for influence campaigns

    North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts November 2020 Billings – Semiconductor Digest – generally a good sign for the global economic outlook. A dip in semiconductor equipment is usually the canary in the coal mine for global economic time.

  • 2020 media diary

    I was inspired to write a 2020 media diary after re-reading a post that I had contributed to Stephen Waddington’s blog back in 2015 that looked at my online and offline media consumption. Prior to COVID; it wouldn’t have changed that much from the 2015 variant. In fact in 2020, a lot is still the same through COVID. A number of the changes had happened had been driven prior to COVID.

    But lets start off the 2020 media diary with the COVID effects.

    Zoom fatigue

    When I started off working in agency life. Being able to work from home wasn’t possible for a couple of reasons. I didn’t have my own space that I could work at. Even if I could, I would need to find a block of work where I would need to write and concentrate rather than bounce ideas of colleagues.

    Carver M-500t power amplifier at the top

    I idealised working from home as a bit like the early bits of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Working in my pyjamas, with a kick ass hi-fi. The future is more banal. I own a nice Sony pre and power amp combo rather than a Carver Audio system based around the M-500t power amplifier.

    But what its actually meant was an extension of the working day and a blurring of the line between work and personal time. I empathised with those people I saw using the edge of the bed as an office chair and their dressing table as a desk on Zoom calls.

    Zoom fatigue set in. Zoom was tiring for a few reasons. Calls were often stacked up one after the other. Secondly you couldn’t carve out blocks of time for it like email. Instead its a constant low level presence; rather like Stack or WhatsApp groups. When you did a group video call, there is a lot happening on screen and its much more of a cognitive load than your average meeting. Finally there is the extension of the working day.

    And no, I haven’t managed to work in my dressing gown.

    Return of the desktop

    If I had written my 2020 media diary before March, I would have referenced discussions around ‘post-PC age’; even if it wasn’t mirrored in my own behaviour. I primarily used my Mac for content creation because I spent a lot of my time outside the home. Not being so mobile has meant that my iPhone has been used less and my Mac has been used much more.

    Continuity provided integration across my iPhone, iPad and Mac. All my messenger apps have a desktop client, which I can toggle between on the Mac. A lot of the apps in my personal use made no sense as I have been by my home entertainment set up all the time. Ocado stopped supporting their mobile app as they become overwhelmed with orders; which meant that my shopping was completed on my Mac. My iPhone was then only really useful as a phone.

    Messenger for keeping in touch and on track

    I have been using messenger clients for almost as long as I have been online. I used to have them all together in an app called Adium X on the Mac. Unfortunately that isn’t possible any longer. Instead I am using a hodge podge of clients

    WeChat, LINE, Signal, Skype, Apple Messages, Slack, Zoom, Teams, WhatsApp and KakaoTalk. Over the past 12 months Signal has become very popular and I am using WeChat with contacts inside and outside China much less. Signal took off because of concerns about privacy amongst my network at home and abroad.

    Secondly, I have been using my Mac as my primary messaging device which was definitely an effect that COVID had on my 2020 media diary.

    From always on to keeping it off

    When I started to use internet based services, you made an active decision to get online. You dialled up or logged on. For the best part of the past few decades we moved towards an always-on world. People often complained about the amount of email received at work; the way the email client was a constant draw, when they could be getting things done instead. First my Mac at home was constantly connected to the internet and mobile phones allowed us to be called directly on the go. Then we had mobile email and a nascent web experience. From there it was apps. My 2020 media diary has seen this accelerate even further. Immediacy has been accelerated even further and has been making people burn out and feel sick.

    Turning off and keeping the internet off has now become an active decision. All be it, one that has become much harder to make.

    Flickr is an archive

    Flickr is still my visual archive and an essential part of my 2020 media diary; but since I have been out and about much less. Its less of a source of anxiety for me since Smugmug purchased it from Yahoo!

    Facebook is private groups

    I continue to use Facebook in a similar way to developer friends using Stack Overflow or other forums for professional social discourse on a couple of private groups. I go directly into the groups, I don’t bother looking at the home page news feed.

    Twitter: paring back

    Back in 2019, I started to cut back what I posted on Twitter and how long I wanted it to be on there. Generally posts won’t last more than a week on my profile.

    My Instagram has been paired back and just shares a record from my collection now and again. Just enough activity for people to know that I am still alive, but that’s it.

    Media content

    2020 saw me bulk up my vinyl collection. I bought digital music and vinyl records on Bandcamp. I also bought CDs and vinyl from the Discogs marketplace.

    The major change has been the way I listen to my music. When I was out and about I use a late model iPod Classic upgraded with 256GB flash memory storage. My listening has now moved to my Mac. I invested in a high quality pair of headphones (Beyerdynamic x Massdrop.com DT177X Go for home listening, they are 32 ohms which makes them very easy to drive). I don’t have to worry about driving them with a big amplifier. I also don’t need noise cancelling to deal with the the clutter of my office surroundings. My Bose headphones are charged but unused for the past eight months.

    I have been using my Mac’s native Podcasts app and have pretty much given up watching news from the major UK news channels. The whole Brexit debacle and a failure to hold politicians of all parties accountable meant that I instead listen to content from the likes of RTÉ, CNBC, NPR, NHK and KBS instead. I get this content via their podcasts.

    I still have an Apple TV box that I use for Bloomberg TV, Yahoo! Finance (which is surprisingly good), Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and iTunes store content.

    News is print, the web and RSS.

    Given everything that has been going on, I decided to invest in a print and digital Financial Times subscription. Why print? I like to scan my news quickly on the newspaper with my morning coffee. I can then dive into stories that catch my eye in more depth online. Placement on print provides a layer of context that digital doesn’t really have.

    My RSS reader of choice is still Newsblur.com. That is now supplemented through email updates from Sinocism, the China Research Group and a whole pile of marketing and advertising newsletters.

    I still read magazines. I am currently subscribed to Monocle and the US edition of Wired magazine. I have print and digital access to both.

    Search promiscuity

    I still bookmark with pinboard.in and now have almost 55,000 bookmarks at the time of writing. This represents a ‘trusted universe’ of web pages that I often search in first before going to DuckDuckGo and then Google. I use DuckDuckGo as my first option of search engine. It isn’t because it the best, but for many searches its good enough. Going there first means that I am giving Google less of my data, which has incremental benefits from a privacy point of view. I would like to see DuckDuckGo improve the quality of its organic search results, but that is likely to be a slow process since it is based on Bing search technology.

    Brands that cut through

    I first wrote the headline brands that cut through in my 2015 post. And I started to question as I wrote my 2020 media diary, what does cut through mean in a COVID world? I don’t need the kind of purpose advertising that Dettol came up with in the UK.

    For many of the brands that I like, the product is the marketing – the online marketing efforts of these brands are coincidental.

    COVID tested service brands. Ocado came close to losing me as a customer.

    Hermes reinforced my impression of their service being dreadful.

    The Royal Mail and Parcelforce delivery people continued to shine. Though I have qualms about Amazon’s business practices, they did what I wanted them to. Prior to lockdown I had upgraded my parents to a newer model Apple iPad and have Facetimed them every day. Each day the quality has been consistently good.

    If one brand stood out in terms of its marketing, it was Carhartt US stood out for me this year in the way that it tried to be useful in a low key way to the essential workers and first responders in its customer base.

    Authority in crisis

    Five years ago, if you had told me that I wouldn’t be listening to the BBC any longer and that the prime minister would be so bad at handling a crisis. I wouldn’t have believed you. It sounds like some fantastical dystopian vision. Some institutions have managed to burn through a lot of latent goodwill, moral and intellectual authority. But it’s not just the UK. The Hong Kong government has issues that go beyond the 2019 protests; with a diffusion of power and responsibility. In the US, the Trump administration was surreal. The one bright light being Mike Pompeo, who was at least consistent with regards China.

    Examples of the kind of good leadership that we should expect, stood out for their abnormality; when in reality it should be the other way around. Democracy should give us great leaders in moments of crisis, shouldn’t it?

    Veering towards the jackpot

    In William Gibson’s last two books The Peripheral and Agency, there is the concept of a slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. It isn’t one thing that does the human race in like a meteor, a rogue AI or a nuclear holocaust. Instead its a slow drumbeat of events over decades: changes in weather, mass pandemics, flood, drought and populism.

    I’ve previously enjoyed William Gibson’s visions of the near and far future. It taught me a lot about technology and where the rubber hit the road between tech and people. 2020 has felt like we’ve veered towards the jackpot. Now having lived in Hong Kong post-SARS, I realise that feeling is overly dramatic. We have historically lucked out in the west. COVID-19 posed a unique challenge, because you spread the virus before you exhibit symptoms, which is remarkably different to SARS and other conditions. I hope I am here in five years time to review this 2020 media diary and write a more upbeat 2025 media diary.