Ged Carroll

Category: meme | 模因 | 밈 | ミーム

We think of the meme now as the lowest form of culture of a standard trope that is used to explain a situation by shorthand, but the reality is more complex.

The text book definition of a meme would be an idea, behaviour, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. Richard Dawkin coined the word meme in his book The Selfish Gene, I have also heard the concept articulated as an idea virus.

So that would bring in things in everyday life that you take for granted like the way we tie up shoelaces. People who have been in the military tend to use a ‘ladder approach’ versus going criss-cross.

Its what can bind tribal affiliations together. Many people support the same sports team as the people around them such as neighbours, peers or friends and family. The initial choice about the team to support is memetic in nature.

Memes have moved beyond being an analogy to being a badge of belonging and even the lingua franc itself. If one looks at 4Chan’s /b/ channel mostly consists of anonymous users bombarding memes at each other. Occasionally there will be a request to customise a meme image from a user and the community piles in.

Memetics became a formal field of academic study in the 1990s. The nucleus for it as a field of study was Dawkins books and a series of columns that started appearing in the Scientific American during the early 1980s by Douglas Hofstadter and Media Virus by Douglas Rushkoff.

  • Piggate scandal

    In case you’ve lived under a rock for the past few days, Piggate is something you will want to be over by now.

    What is Piggate?

    Piggate is an uncorroborated allegation. David Cameron is alleged to have put part or all of his genitals in the mouth of a dead pig. This alleged to have been part of an initiation ceremony of an exclusive dining club during his time at Oxford University. The allegation appeared in an unauthorised biography of Cameron ‘Call me Dave‘ co-authored by Lord Ashcroft.

    A couple of thoughts on Piggate

    • David Cameron lived out his childhood and young adult life in a world without social media. There will be countless people of his generation thinking ‘there but for the grace of God go I‘ due to the youthful high jinks in military barracks, schools and sports clubs around the world. This is what happens when male bonding gets ritualised. It’s not pleasant to think about, but it doesn’t surprise me. If true, it has be better than events like the Tail Hook scandal which resulted in sexual harassment, or fraternity hazing deaths. No one was harmed. I presume the pig wasn’t killed especially for the event
    • Lord Ashcroft has deliberately burnt bridges with this book and it would be more interesting to find out what persuaded him to take such drastic action. Also it wouldn’t be that hard to make a short list up of the likely MP who told Ashcroft the story (if they exist at all). It is the kind of story worthy of House Of Cards and shows how brutal party politics can be

    Finally, how did CassetteBoy manage to put together Getting Piggy With It so fast? This kind of video splicing is hard to do. The editing itself would only take up part of the time. The big time suck would be going through to research the right clips that can then be put together. 

    More meme related content here.

  • Media diary of a gen X man

    Stephen Waddington’s daughter Ellie posted a media diary with a guest post on his blog, go and have a read of it. This snowballed into what is likely to be a series of media diary posts by different people. My contribution was published on his blog this morning. I penned the original version of my media diary as a stream of consciousness whilst laid up. I’ve tried to clear up any typing and comment on the reactions to date here which I have bundled together as the directors cut.

    The directors cut

    So why the media diary directors cut? I have cleaned up a few typos and expanded on a few bits for clarity, hence the directors cut comment.

    I wouldn’t say my media diary is that of a typical consumer, I have lived inside the technology-media industrial complex since the late 1990s and worked in the scientific side of the UK’s now largely defunct industry prior to that. I am steeped in counter-culture since the mid-1980s and spent a fair bit of time in Hong Kong – which changed my outlook somewhat. I am also unencumbered by family life at the moment.

    Reactions

    The reaction so far to the posting has been interesting:

    • Stephen described me in his intro to my post as having ‘iconoclastic tendencies’. I guess so, though this is coming less from wanting to tear systems down, than finding tools that work for me. This is done in the ethos behind Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools and the earlier Whole Earth Catalog. Despite being a long time Apple user, I don’t have all my data in the Apple ecosystem and I felt a similar way about the likes of Google and Facebook. I also like the idea of services that do one thing well. And like to support services like Newsblur or Pinboard that are made by one person or a small team. I guess this explanation of my framework allows the directors cut view to provide a little more context. And I guess iconoclastic works as shorthand in the meantime, Stephen has known me on and off for over 20 years.
    • I was amused at being called a mature hipster, although in this day and age it might be a way of saying metropolitan elite. This I guess would be accurate. The sunny side of this viewpoint would be that it goes to prove that geeks are the new cool. I always thought of myself closer to the comic store owner in The Simpsons. I have never considered myself an elite; which I hope comes across in the directors cut.
    • The last part of the article was called out by a few people who got in touch, my comments on privacy seemed to touch a nerve in a way that my concerns about innovation didn’t. The UK economy is not going to get saved from going into decline like Greece during the last financial crisis with just a few blockchain start-ups

    Messenger for keeping in touch and on track

    Over a decade ago I used to use Adium X, a multi-service instant messaging client for the Mac to keep in touch with a wide range of friends, colleagues, suppliers and clients. Each client was like hitting a different layer of clay in an archeological dig, indicating when I knew them.

    People on ICQ where the longest held contacts, then Yahoo! Messenger (I even ended up working at Yahoo!), Windows Live messenger was purely about my time at Waggener Edstrom and GoogleTalk became de-rigeur when the bots on Yahoo! Messenger came too much.

    Now I use WeChat, LINE, Signal, Skype and Telegram. Like IM platforms before it each messenger platform fits a segment of friends, colleagues and clients.

    Flickr is an archive

    I have friends that are talented photographers and you can’t convince me that some nice filters and a square picture adds up to the pretentions of photographic art that many people seem to feel it has. I have been on Flickr for 11 years and 18,345 photographs later, it would have to be a really compelling service that would get me to move. Flickr is my stock image library,it is my visual diary, image hosting for my blog and my mood board for when I am looking for inspiration at work.

    I think it has a better community than Instagram because it isn’t ubiquitous, it still has that early web 2.0 smell to it, though my heart is in my mouth every time Yahoo!’s finances take a wobble.

    Facebook is utilitarian

    I 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 don’t even bother with cognitive dissonance type of posts of it always being sunny on Facebook. I know it’s crap; in your heart-of-hearts you probably know it too. Facebook events are often used, alongside meetup.com and Eventbrite. For loose network contacts, Facebook acts like a poorly designed phone book.

    Twitter: I have a bot for that

    Twitter is used as a messaging service for some of my friends, but mostly I use it to passively consume content like breaking news in lists and syndicate content that I find interesting. I do this syndication through various ‘recipes’ set up in IFTTT.

    Media content

    Steve Jobs talked about the only way to fight music piracy was to have a better idea. So for a number of years I have bought my music on iTunes, Bleep and Beatport alongside my love of vinyl records. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the record labels as they have consistently focused on short term blockbuster hits at the expense of slow and steady selling artists – which is especially retarded when you think about the long tail model of media consumption. They need to evolve their business model to become cheaper and more efficient in their A&R processes in order to do this. I have recently started ripping CDs into my music library again as an arbitrage play (these are often cheaper than digital downloads) or offer back catalogue content that digital services don’t.

    I use a late model iPod Classic because of its 160GB storage. For streaming music I listen to mixes, mash ups, edits and remixes on Soundcloud and deephousepage.com. My current favourite remixer is Luxxury. I use the online radio channels (not Beats 1) in iTunes to have as relaxing background music prior to turning in at home.

    I watch live news on television as the broadcast network is better for supporting big audience numbers in comparison to the infrastructure of the internet. We have more bandwidth at the edges, but still the same bottlenecks I experienced some ten years previously during the July 7 bombings in London.

    I have an Apple TV box that I use for Netflix, internet radio and iTunes store content. Out of the terrestrial channels I tend to only use iPlayer as it is so much better designed than 4oD, ITV Player or Channel 5’s offering. I stream RTE News, Bloomberg TV and the BBC World Service. My favourite news content comes from Vice – it feels like the channel that CNN should have been and is less shaped to meet the norms of the establishment, though this will undoubtedly change in the near future.

    News is apps and RSS.

    My RSS reader of choice is Newsblur.com. I was a minority amongst my peers in that I never trusted my bookmarks and OPML data to Google’s Reader, instead using Bloglines and then Fastladder.com. Both of which where driven out of business by Google prior to them closing Reader.

    Instead bookmarking is done with pinboard.in. I also get news from the RTE News app, a breaking news list I built in Twitter, stratfor.com, vice.com and the South China Morning Post mobile app. If you’d asked me this ten years ago then The Economist would have been on here, but its been replaced by vice.com and Monocle magazine.

    When I get to read a newspaper; it is the FT and the Wall Street Journal on the way home from work as a way to decompress, or the weekend FT for a mellow Saturday morning. I still read the US edition of Wired magazine in a print copy as the accompanying digital subscription has somehow become borked on my iPad. My media indulgence would be occasionally rifling through the pages of Japanese style magazine Free & Easy.

    I subscribe to a number of email newsletters for specialist analysis.

    Brands that cut through

    The brands that cut through for me are ones that cut their own path. I don’t wake up in the morning and think:

    hell yeah I want to engage with a brand on a social channel

    With people like Carhartt, Gregory Mountain Products, Canon, Nikon, Mystery Ranch, Barebones Software, Apple, S-Double Studios, Porter Tokyo and IWC Schaffhausen the product is the marketing – the online marketing efforts of these brands are coincidental. I do know that many of these brands do spend a good deal of effort to influence the kind of publications that I read. Monocle magazine does a really good job of integrating marketing and content.

    I buy much more online now, the high street has become quite bland, especially after having lived in Asia. I use trans shipment company buyee.jp to buy items in Japan and lightinthebox.com has replaced many of the none-impulse purchases that I would have made at Argos.

    Challenge for brands, media and life itself

    The internet has come to mirror the wonders, banalities and horror of everyday life. As I write this Ellen Pao had resigned as CEO at Reddit. Reddit is a poster child for all of these categories from organising gifts for the poor to water cooler chatter, racism and death threats against Ms Pao.

    Culture has now been made massively parallel by the internet. As an 18 year old, I remember having to get a train down to London to go trawling through specialist shops from Camden to Soho  looking for Stussy clothing and records on the Japanese Major Force label. Now everything is up on YouTube or Soundcloud for you to enjoy.

    Making a difference is a work in progress

    Like Ellie, I am not that optimistic about aspects of the world. In many respects the concerns of gen-y&z mirrored concerns of a young gen-x. I held McJobs and had a constant fear of unemployment over my head, was concerned about nuclear holocaust, economic meltdown and an environmental dystopian future – concerns that I still have today. There is an anti-science bias and a lack of hard innovation coming through that will fuel the next forty years of innovation. The current outlook reminds me a bit of the film Interstellar where the lack of willingness to focus on anything but on our own small plot was killing humans as a species. The current political climate with regards to privacy and digital services indicates a luddite and megalomaniac political tinge, where freedom is being sacrificed for the illusion of safety from extremism. The only thing that actually offers that freedom is a better idea, not an Orwellesque vision of privacy.

    About Ged Carroll

    Ged currently works heading up digital services at Racepoint Global in London. He lives in the East End and spends a lot of time in Hong Kong. You’ll find him online at renaissance chambara.

    So that’s the directors cut of this not so secret internet diary.

    More information

    WeChat
    LINE
    Signal
    Telegram
    Flickr
    Pinboard
    Newsblur
    Bleep
    Beatport
    Luxxury on Soundcloud
    deephousepage
    RTE News Now
    South China Morning Post
    Monocle
    Buyee
    lightinthebox

  • 2015 predictions

    It’s become a bit of an annual tradition on this blog for me to put together some guesswork on what is likely to be coming down the pipe over the next 12 months so here are my 2015 predictions.

    Business

    Sony Corp. cleans house with the management teams of its US businesses. One of Sony’s start-up bets (the e-ink watch, smart locks etc) comes good. Sony will still be supported by its Japanese financial services business.

    For years IBM has charged Huawei a fortune for consulting, telling Huawei the IBM way. In 2015, I could see the student becoming the master as Huawei sells into IBM enterprise markets in the developing world and possibly Europe.

    Shareholder activists don’t take a run at Google. Google is moving from a growth stock to value as search advertising revenue growth is declining. However the structure of Google makes life very difficult for the activists to gain leverage. Any activist that does take a run at Google would need to go to court to help dismantle the two-tier structure that handicaps the shareholder voting structure. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be shareholder grandstanding and public letters to the board. Google’s privacy and antitrust regulatory woes will continue to fester outside the U.S.

    As Fred Wilson over at A VC put it, the sharing economy is actually the rental economy, the digital economy equivalent of bulk breakage: breaking a larger container down to sell smaller, more manageable pieces to consumers for a profit. It’s disruption usually stems from breaking regulations: labour laws, public transportation regulations, laws governing guest house and hotels rather than innovation. It is likely to prey on the have-nots and is likely to see increased resistance. For me it is indicative of a move in founder culture, from the counterculture influenced start-ups of Apple’s era to a yuppie Patrick Bateman-like culture today. Expect more societal push-back as geeks become the new investment bankers in terms of being societal punch bags.

    IoT / wearables

    There won’t be an over-arching XML type bridge for the IoT. Battery life will limit the fantastic visions that pundit have for wearables and the internet of things.

    I would be surprised if we didn’t see some devices trying to power themselves by scrounging energy from wider electromagnetic spectrum (wi-fi networks, cellular devices, radio, TV etc).

    Consumer electronics

    We are going to continue to see baby steps towards more immersive experiences, as VR glasses slowly make progress in the marketplace. OLEDs would be an ideal application for VR glasses, particularly if they want to hold off smartphones in a frame. Content is likely to role out in a similar way to IMAX – visually stunning documentaries about space and nature alongside computer games. Content and gaming will be slow due to it being difficult to make. Storytelling in VR won’t be a problem solved in my 2015 predictions.  It will be interesting to see what James Cameron does with VR. There will also be some baby steps towards haptic feedback (think a better Nintendo PowerGlove).

    Despite The Interview, Hollywood still won’t do cinema / digital simultaneous releases, or global simultaneous releases for any content that wouldn’t have been direct to TV/video in an earlier age.

    Wireless

    The YotaPhone2 won’t get the customer base it deserves as it struggles against the superior marketing muscle of Samsung in the premium Android segment of the market.

    The Cyanogen distribution of Android won’t go anywhere fast due to its geographic exclusivity agreements with the likes of OnePlus and MicroMax cramping the style of handset manufacturers with global ambitions. This offers an opportunity for Jolla’s SailfishOS. but I suspect that my 2015 predictions will mark a high spot in diversity of smartphone brands. Instead we’re likely to see a thinning out of brands over the coming of years, slowly but surely.

    Google revamps the resources and process to get more Chinese smartphone manufacturers going through its official channels for compatibility (CTS) and have a Google Mobile Services (GMS) license. At the moment there are a number of Android handsets going into developing markets without these, which means Google is losing out on incremental licensing revenue. More wireless content here.

    Online/social

    There is a change of emphasis in business, social is no longer well, social. Businesses start to pull ‘social’ media back into business functions. An increased emphasis on paid media over earned engagement / community management and marketing automation makes social look more like electronic direct marketing.

    Asian platforms WeChat, LINE and KakaoTalk have led the way in both consumer and brand adoption. They will continue with a relatively slow international rollout. Facebook Messenger doesn’t seem to fill the same user context as these applications, is this an opportunity that a SnapChat or new player can fill?

    Things could get very interesting if WeChat or LINE professionalise their international marketing and start rolling out some of their more advanced features internationally such as integrating payments and m-commerce. They can’t do it by going alone, they would need to be good partners and deals like that take time to negotiate.

    I suspect that international e-commerce will have breakout years. Yesasia.com, Rakuten and Aliexpress have been percolating for years. Combine this with the valuation put on Asian e-commerce outfits, it would be quite easy to see how cost-conscious consumers in economically challenged Europe and the developing world may appreciate a new Amazon. Secondly, Chinese purchases of foreign goods are likely to expand further due to a rapidly developing logistics network within China, increasing international acceptance of UnionPay and a rein-in on more ostentatious tastes due to Mr Xi’s anti-corruption drive. Consumers will be looking for quality less overt luxury and premium products. Foreign travel for shopping will start to be scrutinised by the government and foreign shopping through intermediaries will become professionalised by the Rakutens of this world.

    We’re likely to see European states take a similar stance to India and China and more widely blocking sites for security considerations and media IP enforcement. Expect the UK and Australia to lead the way in terms of site censorship.

    What do you think about my 2015 predictions?

    More information
    Who is behind the e-paper FES watch? | WSJ
    Sony Qrio smart lock crowd funding page
    What Just Happened? AVC

  • 2014 crystal ball gazing: how did I do?

    2014 crystal ball gazing

    2014 crystal ball gazing was a culmination of thinking that I have been doing on where digital is going. For the past few years I have been thinking about where digital is going and what it all means. At the end of last year here were my projections. I do realise that putting my 2014 crystal ball gazing out there may make me luck very foolish, I guess you can make up your own mind.

    Drone deliveries

    Amazon won’t do drone delivery in 2014 – Whilst trials of drone deliveries have been ongoing and drones seem to be getting more mainstream thanks to companies like DJI Amazon hasn’t done deliveries yet. In addition, the FAA in the US started to regulate commercial drone usage, which is likely to slow down adoption in the short term, while providing a stable legal framework of operation in the longer term.

    Small data

    Small data – Not so much an explicit interest in smaller data sets for meaningful things, but the Hortonworks IPO had an almost Netscapean quality to it with shaky revenue streams and a healthy share price bounce when it came to market. It also made Silicon Valley nervous as companies were concerned about negative perceptions toward the big data ‘sector.

    O2O

    Offline to online integration – O2O seems to be a bigger thing in China and other east Asian markets with ‘mobile search keywords’ put into adverts and TV programmes for years. The QRcode seems to be a uniquely Asian form of integration largely abandoned by western developers – mainly because they didn’t seem to use them in as imaginative a manner compared to Tencent et al. Lower power Bluetooth beacons are still experimental. Weve the joint company set up by the UK wireless carriers to provide contextual data about consumers to integrate online and offline marketing is running at a loss and has abandoned peripheral business opportunities in mobile wallets/ m-payments.

    Programmatic

    Algorithmic display advertising – there are a number of ways in which greater data is being brought to bear on programmatic ad spend but algorithms weren’t the biggest thing shaping the market this year. Major brands seem to have developed a distrust of the agency trading desks and the lack of transparency into market data. Instead of giving agencies an unfair advantage and allowing them to play both sides of the trade, they are bring the trading desk in-house.

    Mobile ad formats

    Mobile display advertising gets a radical reduction in formats – at the time I wrote this prediction, I had been concerned about clickthrough rates and mistaken clickthroughs, so I considered a reduction in mobile formats to just the ones that worked best like the page takeover. I didn’t forsee a bubble economy driving mobile display revenues around games apps. This may come to a head soon as western consumers seem to be less open to downloading to new apps according to research by Deloittes.

    Content marketing

    Content marketing on OTT platforms – WeChat has evolved in leaps and bounds with some amazing campaigns coming out in China, Burberry has worked with Tencent to push the envelopes on their campaigns and have included live webcasts. We haven’t seen so much of this happening with campaigns aimed at western consumers, but one brand springs to mind Vivienne Tam who ran a super model contest on the platform including a voting function and a special blog covering activity around New York Fashion Week as a separate tab on the account – all in English.

    China going global

    Chinese technology brands will finally be successful outside China – It’s still early days, but we’ve seen Lenovo and other Chinese brands demolish Samsung’s share of the smartphone market in the developing world. WeChat has expanded into India, Spain and South East Asia. OnePlus and Xiaomi have started selling direct in Europe, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Alibaba had a monster IPO and Baidu bought into fast start-ups like Uber.

    Consumer privacy

    Privacy issues won’t change much with consumers – Back at the end of last year I didn’t expect the Snowden story to continue to echo onwards. On the surface things didn’t seem to change with consumers, but there has been sufficient consumer interest that technology vendors are addressing (some) consumer privacy needs much to the chagrin of the law enforcement/military industrial complex. This privacy experience hasn’t been universally enjoyed (depending on country regulations) but things are changing.

    Tech workers

    Technology company workers are the new bankers – the tech worker bus protests that started at the end of December 2013 mushroomed, so by August 2014 Westboro Baptist Church got involved. Uber’s surge pricing and Snapchat’s frat boy CEO were just some of the lightning rods that made the tech sector look like vintage Wall Street.

    Immersion

    The rise of immersion – When I wrote my predictions I felt that I had been cheated out of the cyberpunk future that I had been promised and saw it as a major opportunity. Virtual reality had lost out in the 1990s when cumbersome helmet displays would disorientate you and cause you to throw up as the visuals and movement created dissonance partly due to a lack of computing power. Now we’ve seen cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson the chief futurist at one VR company, Facebook own another and companies like Zeiss and Samsung enter the fray. Together with advances in AR post-Google Glasses we are likely to see major innovations beyond gaming in the web-of-no-web.

    Machine programming

    Machine learning will threaten to disrupt programming – while machine learning is making an increased amount of noise in the tech media it is being seen as a leap forward in artificial intelligence rather than as an alternative strategy to traditional application programming. Skype adopted for their latest language training.

    Hyper-competition

    A race to the bottom will bring out hyper-competition in mobile semiconductor suppliers – the mobile market did race to the bottom which has made a major dent in Samsung and Huawei’s marketshare. Mediatek and Hi-Silicon are producing innovative silicon that has pushed phone performance forward. However rather than being a race to the bottom on pricing, Qualcomm has been taken to task by the Chinese government and Qualcomm admitted in its own financial documents that there at least some partners who weren’t paying them licence fees.

    How do you think I did on 2014 crystal ball gazing?

    More information
    2014: just where is it all going? | renaissance chambara 

  • Ontheroof & things that made last week

    Russian crew ontheroof took their skills to Hong Kong, hacking one of the city’s iconic electronic billboards mounted on the top of an unfeasibly tall building. Ontheroof have attracted sponsorship from large corporates despite the illegal nature of their work. They’ve worked with brands like Huawei and Canon cameras.

    Their risk profile would preclude many western brands from collaborating with them. I was surprised that Canon did a deal with them.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if they were weren’t demonetised on YouTube due to their risky and illegal behaviour. Even if landlords were open-minded, their insurance company certainly wouldn’t be. It isn’t about getting ontheroof to sign a waiver; but all the unintended consequences:

    • They could fall off and hit someone
    • The building could be sued for damages due to the trauma of watching one of them fall of a building to their death

    If they used safety harnesses their content would lose its appeal as they are competition with other crews looking to ever more extreme footage.

    Not too sure if the swiftly added disclaimer would be enough to stop the lawyer letters coming through the letter box with this ode to Invisalign braces. When does parody become slander.

    Wee Scottish travel agent Thorne Travel put together a unique YouTube advert. I am guessing that it go nowhere near a legal team before it was uploaded on YouTube. Not too sure that they have permission from David Guetta for the soundtrack or Disney for the appearance of Mickey and Minnie Mouse – which probably explains why it got taken down. I thought that the N.W.A. soundtracked remix of the video was inspired. It also provided material for The Poke.

    The Poke have remixed some of their videos including a Halloween themed one with Michael Jackson’s Thriller the soundtrack and strategically placed pumpkins.

    Warner Brothers are pushing out to Western audiences Black Butler, a Japanese live action adaption of a Faustian manga tale. If you like anime like Death Note, you’ll like Black Butler.

    Finally, Agence France Presse put together a really good animation on how Ebola attacks the body, surprisingly it was hosted on DailyMotion.