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.

  • Walmart + other things

    Walmart online to offline retailing

    A really interesting video with Walmart that looks at the interface between online and offline retailing. Particularly interesting take on mobile payment form factors. Amazon presents an existential threat to the Walmart business. Walmart isn’t going down without a fight. It has innovated in the past on using technologies like data mining. More recently Walmart has been making strategic purchases across the online retail realm. 

    More retail related content here

    Water resistance

    The reality of watch water resistance is that it is usually measured in a pressurised laboratory rig. Five years ago Casio took their Frogman model from the G-Shock range and did the test in open water off the coast of Japan. It shows the reality of the watch being exposed to a depth of 200M. The two most disappointing aspects of this video are:

    • It hasn’t got as much viewer love as it deserves
    • They failed to come across any diakaiju during the dive and we don’t know what Japan’s beloved son Godzilla (ゴジラ Gojira) thinks of the G-Shock range

    Name generator

    Citizenfour the Edward Snowden documentary launched this week, which prompted a lot of NSA product name silliness including too much time spent on the NSA Product Name Generator

    Mascots

    The people at Rocket News have come up with a new take on the Japanese mascot meme with Hard Ku**mon. More here. Japan seems to have mascots for everything as a way to engage consumer attention. The mascots can build up to be big business in their own right and gain international attention. 

    NASA apps

    Finally I have been working my way through NASA’s collection of iPad and iPhone applications, more here. NASA has an amazing range of content. I would also recommend checking out their flickr accounts for high quality imagery.

  • Yahoo corporate culture

    I bumped into some former colleagues over the past couple of weeks and the experience reminded me of a lot of the items in this post. We shared a common bond based on our exposure to the Yahoo corporate culture. Given the circling activist investors surround the current iteration of Yahoo! this maybe a capsule of a soon-to-disappear culture. Many of the things below are artefacts, totems of the Yahoo corporate culture.

    • You know that Yahoo! was the brand and a Yahoo was a person who worked for Yahoo!
    • You were told that you bleed purple. There were values that were ingrained into you
    • You understood the struggle of constantly moving budgets and spending a quarter’s marketing budget in three weeks
    • You have an address book full of friends and aquantances working at great companies in digital media. The business was a rotating door for talent, in six months you had a great Rolodex full of contacts.
      Yahoo! timbuk2 bag
      Your have an old brand Yahoo! laptop bag that just won’t die. Not too sure what they made those Timbuk2 bags from but mine is eight years old, well travelled and still looks new.
    • Friends introduce you to former colleagues you were less familiar with by including their IM identity as well as their name.
      Yahoo! star
      You still have a star kicking around in a box somewhere from when you packed up your desk one last time.
      Lost
      Your colleagues gave you a list of tchotchkes to get from the shop in building D if you went to the headquarters campus in Sunnyvale.

    You’re still using at least one of Jerry and David’s Christmas presents around the house.

  • Nine years span + more news

    Nine years span platform deal

    Reckitt Benckiser and Facebook announce partnership to get digitally closer to consumer – partnership over nine years. In the space of nine years Geocities went from vibrant community to graveyard. Over nine years MySpace relaunched twice – this agreement between RB and Facebook is a bet against disruptive innovation. That implies a whole range of issues regarding antitrust considerations. More FMCG related content here.

    Branding

    Oakley Disruptive by Design | Designboom – interesting how Oakley is trying to now associate itself with design goodness, rather than being disruptive designers themselves now

    TD Bank Boost Customer Advocacy via ATMs | VisibleBanking.com – nice iteration on the Coca-Cola campaigns of recent years

    JWT Launches ‘Forever Faster’ for Puma | MediaBistro – we were watching this advert in the office this morning and didn’t make any sense beyond being mildly entertaining

    Business

    Why Ebay Tells Manufacturers in China What You’re Searching For – The Atlantic – interesting thoughts around authenticity and nostalgia

    Here’s The Difference Between Working At Facebook, Google, And Microsoft — According To Someone Who Has Worked At All Three – some cultural insights at different companies. Interesting how stack ranking doesn’t seem to have turned Microsoft into a pressure cooker

    Guest post: has doing business in China just got too risky? | FT – don’t overreact (paywall)

    The Most Fascinating Profile You’ll Ever Read About a Guy and His Boring Startup | Business | WIRED – great interview with Stewart Brand

    An Insider’s Account of the Yahoo-Alibaba Deal – Harvard Business Review – interesting view of the deal from Sue Decker

    Chilling policy announced for China’s instant messaging services | WantChinaTimes – not really surprising, China has already tried to implement real name policy for cell phone SIMs and Weibo accounts. We’ll see how successful it actually is

    20 of 21 provinces probed engaged in property-related corruption | WantChinaTimes – openness by the Chinese government

    Online

    Forget :) Baidu’s Simeji App Captures Teenage Hearts in Japan – Bloomberg – interesting how traditional media is still a major driver of memes and trends

    Survey: YouTube Stars More Popular Than Mainstream Celebs Among U.S. Teens | Variety – self-serving data points

    15 specialist social network apps in China | Techinasia – interesting set of applications

    Meme

    Weibo user solicits pics for ‘most beautiful bosom’ contest｜WantChinaTimes.com – could you get away with this on Twitter, I doubt it

    Security

    Hacker’s own guide to the exploit | Pastebin – I found it really interesting that Google was do important in the process

    Technology

    China Online Shopper Spent $12.5 Billion Buying from Oversea E-tailers | ChinaInternetWatch – which is especially interesting given the ubiquity of UnionPay within China

    New Strategy as Tech Giants Transform Into Conglomerates | NYTimes – I would have thought that Microsoft and Cisco where already at conglomerate status?

    Wireless

    Huawei to slash low-end mobile phone models: executive | WantChinaTimes – interesting move, probably struggling to compete against other Shenzhen businesses living on razor thin margins

  • Chopstick Brothers

    The Chopstick Brothers are a comedy duo with a film out in Chinese cinemas called 老男孩之猛龙过江 (Old Boy The Way of The Dragon).

    In order to promote the film they released a single called 小苹果 (Little Apple).

    Little Apple is an annoyingly catchy melody with simple chords and its own dance designed to appeal to plaza dancing ‘aunties’ (middle-aged women). That has mean’t the the Chopstick Brothers work has gone everywhere.

    Here is a video of Little Apple plaza dancers, see the age range of the participants and how seriously this is taken

    As the Australian news video  alludes to, these groups dance to music played on a booming system built into a porters trolley that seems to be accentuated by the hard concrete and glass surfaces surrounding ‘private public’ spaces where they perform.

    Little Apple has an almost EDM quality so that it reproduces well on the these systems. Because of these characteristics Little Apple is similar to one of the annoyingly catchy summer pop records that tend to break in the west: Shanks and Bigfoot – Sweet Like Chocolate, Los Del Rio – Macarena, Henry Hadaway’s version of Chicken Dance credited as The Tweets – The Birdie Song etc.

    And like Psy’s Gangnam Style before it, it has morphed into a number of parodies and became a meme in its own right – with brands getting on board. At the moment the People’s Liberation Army are encouraging different provinces to create their own recruitment video based on the song.

    My favourite version was shot in Liverpool by Shaun Gibson who uses the video to tell a tale from Journey To The West (the video is on Chinese site 56.cn so you need to be patient in allowing it to load). More China related content here.

  • Tangerine ten questions

    If you don’t follow Tangerine NY’s blog, I would recommend that you do for the curated mix of zeitgeist and Tangerine ten questions interviews. The Tangerine ten questions:

    Where are you right now?
    What did you want to be when you were a child?
    How do you think we can keep talent motivated?
    What are you reading now?
    What is you latest ‘must have’?
    What is your favorite piece of technology?
    What subject do you wish you’d paid more attention to in school?
    Where is your favorite place for a drink?
    If you could have one superpower what would it be?
    What is one thing about you that most people would be surprised to know?

    I think that the Tangerine ten questions are a gateway to creating clever engaging content for a number of reasons:

    • They’re human. They provide an idea of the world view of the person
    • They provide useful content depending on the context
    • They encourage the interviewee to provide smart content
    • There are only two lame questions in there and they’re at the end. If you look platforms such as dating platforms you quickly realise that people have more in common, and are less differentiated than you think. The hardest questions in the Tangerine ten questions also have the least value. But eight out of ten is still really good

    My answers to the Tangerine ten questions

    Where are you right now?

    At home sat in front of my laptop sipping a can of Fanta

    What did you want to be when you were a child?

    I could remember that I was more gripped by concern that I managed to get a job when I left school rather than what role it would be. Joblessness was a worry. My parents had moved from Ireland when the economy there was bad and at the time I was in infant school the UK was getting a bailout from the IMF. Later on factories were closed on a daily basis.

    How do you think we can keep you motivated

    I have always marched to beat of my own drum and been self motivated

    What are you reading now?

    Online, I follow hundreds of sites via an RSS reader. Offline, I read Wired magazine religiously. I also enjoy reading non-fiction such as The Dentsu Way.

    What is you latest ‘must have’?

    Rhodia notebooks. I find the paper of a better than Moleskine notebooks, but the Rhodia still has the same useful design features of Moleskines

    What is your favourite piece of technology

    My favourite piece of technology continues to be my Mac.

    What subject do you wish that you had paid more attention to at school?

    I wish I had been allowed to study economics rather than being put into a science track without any input into the matter.

    Where is a favourite place for a drink?

    Alchemy is a small chain coffee shop down the road from my office in Hoi Wan Street in Quarry Bay.

    If I could have one superpower, what would it be?

    Wisdom.

    What is the one thing about me that most people would be surprised to know?

    I was an extra in Chariots of Fire. The experience was very underwhelming and I didn’t get paid.

    What would your answers be? More related content here