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.
River Elegy (河殇) is a six-part documentary broadcast on China’s largest TV station CCTV1, in 1988. River Elegy is a landmark documentary, a more innocent naive Chinese viewpoint that emerged as the country opened up. China and its civilisation has existed around the Pearl and Yellow rivers for 1000s of years, rather like the Rhine and the Elba in Germany.
China had started to open up to the world after the cultural revolution and intellectuals started to learn about how different the west was. River Elegy compares the old ways and Chinese gains in civilisation over thousands of years, with the modern world. In retrospect the River Elegy attacks on traditional culture and Confucianism mirror the rejection of tradition in the cultural revolution. The River Elegy series spurred debate and was seen to be criticism of what the creators perceived to be a slow-moving communist party.
At the time, intellectuals in China were avidly reading the works of western thinkers like John Naisbitt and Alvin Toffler who provided a vision of a rollercoaster centrist techno-utopian future. I get the attraction to young intellectuals. In the 1980s, the future looked bright and technocratic.
The thing that I find most interesting about it is the use of music, imagery and editing is almost psychedelic in its effect. It must have been mind blowing for the audience who tuned into it.
A couple of people involved in the production of River Elegy whore about how it was created in Deathsong of the River – which is a great read. It is interesting to reflect how far this series is from the China of today. It overs an interesting contrast to Xi Thought in both content and presentation style.
Maestro – BOILER ROOM – great documentary about DJ/producer Larry Levan and the Paradise Garage. Levan is one of the people who shaped the modern dance sound. The film does a really good job of setting up the context from disco to house and goes on about other New York clubs like The Loft and The Gallery. It has a great soundtrack and some of the interviewees are fierce.
CLOT Magazine | COLDCUT, a journey through cut and paste and audiovisual innovation – great overview of Coldcult creative efforts and an interview with the group. Coldcut started off as DJ / producers and along the way evolved into multimedia artists as well. Along the way Coldcut founded the Ninja Tunes record label, and in Hex helped push forward multimedia just before the web came along.
Flickr Takes Another Sad Turn, Gets Bought by Something Called SmugMug | Gizmodo – I am thankful that flickr hasn’t been shut down but pensive over what the plan SmugMug has. The sale of flickr means that I am pretty much done as an Oath customer then with the exception of Yahoo! Finance news content. More flickr related content here.
Do Chinese Luxury Consumers Care About British Heritage? | Jing Daily – In the West, we buy into lifestyle brands—we like brands that can sell us everything. But the Chinese consumer likes to go to a specialist for each item. They like to buy their knitwear from one place and their shoes from another. They value quality and are willing to pay for it. – which is where premium streetwear gets in the door
Agency Layoffs Or Agency Calibration? | Forrester Research – examine the characteristics of the players winning creative assignments for digital experiences. Tech consultancies like Accenture Interactive, Deloitte Digital, IBMiX and PwC are successful with system integration and digital experiences. Their combination of data, strategy, implementation and creative is a potent offering for marketers. Yet, their ability to capture the essence of the brand is still developing. For agencies – large or small, public or independent – brand creativity is differentiating
A Renewed Vision For WPP | Forrester Research – I don’t think that a technology leader would get creative businesses and you’d end up with yet another ad tech business with the rest of the value withering away but interesting reading
1 in 4 Deeply Concerned About Online Privacy – GlobalWebIndex Blog – ok its Global Web Index so you have to take the data with a pinch of salt. Global Web Index is based on people completing online surveys. That means that the technique Global Web Index uses needs to be considered alongside the data. It isn’t observed behaviour, but reported behaviour. One might do one thing and say another. The extremely high rate of concern in Latin America in the Global Web Index survey could be a sampling error on the survey or it could be quite profound given that it would be a growth market for social media networks like Facebook
Privacy fears over police spy tools that can break into mobile phones | News | The Times – The technology was first introduced by the Metropolitan Police for the London Olympics in 2012 and has been quietly rolled out. Privacy International’s report says police are operating without any clear legal framework and often break into phones belonging to people who have not been convicted of any crime, including witnesses and victims
BBC Blogs – Technology & Creativity Blog – Shifting gear with the BBC World Service – interesting opportunities for developers, this mirrors the expansion of Chinese and Russian media internationally. The BBC World Service has also had its funding disrupted in a manner that make it more political. The long term impact of this bias is likely to damage the BBC World Service as a soft power tool
Apple manufacturer Foxconn just bought iPhone accessory maker Belkin – great move for Foxconn. Foxconn now gets a number of consumer brands including Linksys and can make better Apple accessories faster based on their knowledge of Apple production – if they can maintain secrecy
Louis Vuitton’s new men’s designer Virgil Abloh is known for streetwear, not high fashion — Quartzy – A new generation of consumers is emerging with different values and desires than previous buyers of high-end goods. Instead of spending their money on fancy suits, young shoppers are dropping hundreds of dollars on items like logo tees and sock sneakers. As clothes continue to move away from formality, brands from Berluti to Balenciaga are adjusting their wares accordingly – with younger Asian consumers as the growth market of the luxury sector the two worlds are merging. Its only been four decades in the making
Sex Workers Say Porn on Google Drive Is Suddenly Disappearing – Motherboard – don’t assume that the contents of your Google Drive hasn’t been thoroughly examined by Google. Adult entertainment is merely the canary in the coal mine for Google Drive privacy. I would be very careful about using a cloud storage platform if you haven’t encrypted the entire folder as a bundle before uploading it. And don’t use Google Drive. More related content here.
Consumer behaviour
The unparalleled joy of writing with a fountain pen – and five beautiful pens to inspire you – Country Life – Among the obituaries of a former Conservative Minister a few years ago, there was one delightful snippet. A line in The Daily Telegraph described how, when she received the letter from Mrs Thatcher appointing her to the Lords, Lady Blatch initially believed it to be a hoax, because the letter was signed in Biro and she had been ‘brought up to believe that nobody who matters uses a Biro’.
Millennials: you will not be quite so special in the ‘futr’ | FT – could it be that millennials, the most scrutinised, criticised and debated generation of our time, were not that special any more? “Millennials are still important as a customer,” Ms Ganatra told me later. But there is now a “millennial mindset” that has nothing to do with age, she said. In other words, millennials may have been the first generation to have grown up in a digital world but the rest of us are catching on fast. People of all ages are now so used to shopping with a click or talking to a chatbot that retailers need to think about the needs and desires of all their customers, not just those born between 1981 and 1996 – or an artificial construct in terms of their digital uniqueness
Ideas
Cigarettes are the vice America needs | FT Alphaville – Cigarette smoking is essentially the anti-Facebook. While Facebook is a fundamentally misanthropic venture that pretends to be a community, smoking is a community activity for people who pretend to be misanthropes. The activity itself is fundamentally pro-social! It gives people reasons to interact with strangers (“got a light?”). And since it was banned indoors — undeniably a good choice — it gives people a reason to go outside and make idle small talk, all while pursuing a common activity. And unlike alcohol, cigarettes alone don’t often lead to property damage or missed days of work (paywall)
Study: Smart Speakers are Changing the Way We Select Products – interesting how this is impacting retail. FMCG brands in particular should be really concerned as this is far beyond what supermarkets could do with dodgy shelving layouts and look-a-like private label brands
Building for the modern web is really, really hard | O’Reilly – average website clocks in at 4MB with 100s of elements including 3rd, 4th and 5th party based interactions – which also explains page load times – and slow AF ad related technology such as trackers
Is Facebook Really Scarier Than Google? | Nautilus – worthwhile reading about the effect of Google – of course they both have an impact otherwise you wouldn’t advertise on it. The question needs to be does the utility justify the impact? I think search has a better case than a social network, but both have merits
Alex Stamos, Facebook Data Security Chief, To Leave Amid Outcry – The New York Times – Some of the company’s executives are weighing their own legacies and reputations as Facebook’s image has taken a beating. Several believe the company would have been better off saying little about Russian interference and note that other companies, such as Twitter, which have stayed relatively quiet on the issue, have not had to deal with as much criticism
Technology
China’s Huawei Technologies reshuffles board for first time since 2012 – I presume the reason why Mr Ren is getting back behind the wheel is that overall and smartphone revenue figures for 2017 was Huawei’s slowest growth in four years. I am not convinced that premium products will be the way forward when they are locked out of the North American retail system. I am also not sure why the management team at Huawei Mobile Devices hasn’t been refreshed
The Valley of Death: the students vying to be millionaires | Telegraph – In 2015 Oxford, the UK’s number one university for research, produced four spin-outs. Not per professor. That was for the whole university. The situation was not better elsewhere. Data on British university spin-outs is not in any publicly available league table. But it exists, via what’s called the HE-BCI survey (it stands for Higher Education – Business and Community Interaction). For 2015-16, Cambridge University recorded a total of two spinouts in the HE-BCI survey. Imperial College London, another of this country’s most vaunted research universities, listed three. Of 160 institutions, 59 officially produced no spinouts at all.