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.

  • Desert Island Discs

    A while ago my friend Ian Wood did a kind of desert island discs meme asking friends on Facebook what six tracks were the soundtracks to their lives. Here were mine. What would be in your Desert Island Discs?

    Jim Reeves – Senor Santa Claus – My Dad was a Jim Reeves fan and Christmas as a small child meant the smell of hot electrics from his DIY Christmas lights triggered by a contact rotated by an electric motor connecting with a circle of brass contacts and lots of hard-wired Christmas lights. No solid-state components or micro-chips involved. All the parts came from an electrical parts salvage shop in Birkenhead which featured dismembered military kit and early computers. Burning carbon bushes and motor grease is as much the smell of Christmas to me as the spices of Christmas pudding. This was accompanied by selections from my Dad’s reel-to-reel tapes of Jim Reeves.

    Johnny Cash – Walk the line – Another track from my Dad’s tape collection, I used to like the back beat on this Johnny Cash track. Live at San Quentin is the best live album issued ever. Better than Woodstock, better than Bruce Springsteen Live/75-85.

    Tyrone Brunson – The Smurf – Whilst I’d liked the disco I’d heard and found Kraftwerk’s The Model intriguing because of its alien feel, secondary school was when music started to get important and electronic music was where it was at. I was left a bit cold by the whole new romantic vibe. Instead I was impressed by electro and the little hi-energy I heard. If one track exemplified this then it was Tyrone Brunson’s The Smurf, this fired my interest in DJing.

    James Brown – Funky Drummer (part 1) – The Art of Noise and Paul Hardcastle drew my attention to sampling but the diversity of tracks that the funky drummer break appeared on hammered it home. I remember hearing it in my fourth or fifth year of secondary school on the In The Jungle Groove compilation and it blew me away.

    Phuture – Acid Tracks – I could have put hundreds of house tracks up here but I kept it down to two. Acid Tracks is timeless, hard-as-nails, alien funk that hasn’t been bettered. It reminds me of running around the country trying to get vinyl records: Liverpool, Warrington, Blackpool, Doncaster and occasionally London. The bad aspect to this was that many of the records were bootlegs and in the case of Trax Records even their own pressings were often crap, recycling older vinyl and repressing over the top! You would also rifle through rock record resellers and mail order catalogues to see if you could find a gem that they didn’t know the value of (though they eventually got hip to it). It is hard to get that sense of achievement now when any track can be Googled or Baidu’d.

    Massive Attack – Unfinished Sympathy – this went in for a couple of reasons. Massive Attack were known as Massive because of Gulf War I hammering radio play and the band’s name resonating with a BBC newscaster’s description of ‘the attack was swift and massive’ (this also played hell with Bomb the Bass’ second album release). The lush sound of the album track was part of the audio background for my first proper job as a lab assistant for a plastics company that no longer exists. I worked on resin formulations for a wide range of products: bullet-proof glass, Bentley head lamp surrounds and bonding materials for the body panels of TVR sportscars. I had a Pro-Walkman and a set of Sennheiser HD414s that I used to listen to music to on the way into work in a Ford Transit crew bus.

    I have a lasting memory of this video being on a laser disc player in the pub where I went for a lunch to celebrate my last day at the job, as I had secured a new one closer to home

    Secondly the remix 12″ of this track with the Nellee Hooper club mix is a classic that remained in my record box; Oakenfold got covered in glory for his mix, but the Hooper mix is the one to have, I’d bring it right up on the Technics pitch control to drop in house sets.

    Joe Smooth – Promised Land – If any one track represented house music it would have to be Joe Smooth’s Promised Land with Anthony Thomas on vocals. Smooth is an unsung hero of house music, first a DJ peer of the likes of Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy, then a producer working with many people on the DJ International roster. My abiding memory from this track is watching a couple of the most macho football casuals hugging each other on the dance floor of a wine bar I was DJing at when I dropped this track. On the video the guy with the flat top and mullet combo is Anthony Thomas, the nerdy looking guy is Joe Smooth.

    Manuel Göttsching – E2-E4 – I’d love to pretend that I was sufficiently with it to have heard of E2-E4 when I was 13, but I didn’t I heard it. When it started to get sampled by other people; notably Sueno Latino. I hunted down and was blown away by the album (its a 59-minute piece of music but the video clip gives you the gist of it and probably the longest Desert Island Discs recording). It beat out Klein & MBO as my last track since it sounds fresher, but is a good reflection of the past and present electronica that I listen to. Göttsching apparently came up with the music as he wanted something to listen to on a flight.

    More related content can be found here.

  • 50 things that make me happy

    Pat Law published her list of 50 things that make her happy, which reminded me of a list I made back in November 2008 on things that made my day. Why 50 tings that make me happy?  The 50 is a challenge and a limitation in the writing of this post. Like Pat, I am not from Bhutan and maybe the wrong person to write about happiness, but what the heck. So this is where I started in coming up with my 50 things in no particular order:

    1. When someone gives their seat up on the tube for an elderly person or pregnant woman. Its a nice reminder that although civic society is on its knees, it isn’t dead yet. Saying that I once offered to give up my seat and the woman attempted to hit me, it seems she was just fat rather than pregnant – but don’t let that put you off being civic-minded
    2. Hallowe’en. Hallowe’en is my favourite holiday of the year. Its celebration doesn’t start in August like Christmas does in most supermarkets, it finishes the following day. It’s has the kitsch of Christmas trappings, but without the expense. Oh and settling down with a bag of popcorn to watch The Exorcist and The Crow is more fun to watch than an epsiode from the James Bond movie franchise and White Christmas
    3. A sunny spring day on Thurstaston Hill. Spring on the Wirral has an immense sense of energy, a sunny day lying on Thor’s Stone watching the clouds coming in from Liverpool Bay like a candy floss armada sailing over the Wirral
    4. Knowing that I love and am loved
    5. Getting to watch St Helens Saints winning games. Rugby league was once described by an Australian writer as a working-class opera and St Helens have been one of the most successful teams in recent years. I only really gained an appreciation of rugby league during my time at college in Huddersfield. Despite the poor performance of the Huddersfield Giants, the town had league in its bones – The George Hotel by the train station being the birthplace of rugby league. Unfortunately I don’t get to see them as much as I would like and the sport still doesn’t get the coverage that it deserves on television
    6. Fly New Balance kicks, my current favourites are the MT580 which I have in various colour-ways
    7. Stussy tops and my US naval aviator jacket
    8. Flying business-class with Cathay Pacific – they won’t go on strike, the food is decent and there is bound to be a couple of films on the entertainment system that I haven’t seen and are worth watching
    9. My MacBook Pro
    10. My iPhone once I discovered the Mophie Juice Pack
    11. Getting to put on my favourite flannel shirt. This shirt is an old workshirt from back when I worked in the oil industry that has been washed a huge number of times, making it unbelievably soft and giving it a faded check pattern that would be at home on My Name Is Earl. After putting this on, you can understand why grunge took off as a style – I know that my Australian colleague Nick Osborne thinks that this is a classic Bogan-style
    12. Getting to watch For A Few Dollars More. No matter how many times I see this film it still gives me an immense amount of pleasure to watch it. It is not as grand as Once Upon A Time In The West and not as well known as The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, but it has probably the best performances of Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood together on screen
    13. Watching pretty much any Wong Kar-wai film, but I have a particular soft spot for 2046 and In The Mood for Love
    14. Getting some time on my decks. Whilst many DJs have moved on to MP3s and CD players there is nothing quite like the tactile experience of mixing with vinyl records. Being able to read the track by the changes in the grooves, the sensation of low frequency sounds and the feel of cueing a heavy vinyl platter are unique
    15. Eating a slice of freshly cooked soda bread. Unlike yeast bread, I prefer to let the soda bread cool properly first and then tuck in.There is something about the whole tactile experience of eating soda bread with a thin scrape of butter and honey or as a side to some Galtee black pudding and white pudding
    16. A warm autumn day with haze so thick you can smell it
    17. Looking out on Victoria Harbour from the Harbour City branch of Starbucks
    18. My Cuisinart coffee machine in action
    19. Motorway driving at night with The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld or The KLF’s Chillout album on the stereo
    20. Finding myself in an airport on the far side of the world and being able to find a good newspaper stall, and have the time to sit down and read a copy of the Irish Independent or The Examiner
    21. Wondering around the Science Museum with my Dad and have him tell me about the different equipment in there and the machines that he has come across in his 50 or so years in engineering from lorry engines, to ships pumps and industrial motors
    22. Pottering around Gosh Comics and discovering a new graphic novel author. Forbidden Planet feels too much like a supermarket in many ways, whereas Gosh feels like the independent vinyl record shops that are rapidly disappearing from Soho
    23. Watching a good film in a decent cinema, despite all the technology there is still nothing quite the big screen. I love the passive entertainment of the cinema – very un-tech of me I know, but its true
    24. Waking up on a Sunday morning and hearing it raining outside whilst I am tucked up in bed
    25. Taking time out to listen to Sunday Miscellany
    26. The mid point in 50 things that make me happy: Hong Kong-style milk tea though its pretty hard to track down a good cup even in Chinatown, London. Caffiene and condensed milk mean that all the main food groups are covered
    27. Eating with friends in the Tsui Wah restaurant chain
    28. The smell of a turf fire
    29. Getting a new watch
    30. Taking a really great picture, mainly because it’s due to serendipity rather than any skill on my part
    31. Buying vinyl records, I love rifling through the trays at Phonica in Soho, it breaks my heart that great shops with knowledgeable shop assistants like Anthony Cox at the former Flying Records in Soho have been replaced by vegan fast food joints, wine bars and hedge funds
    32. Tripped out visuals like SIGGRAPH CGI shorts
    33. Reading the print editions of Wired (US edition) and Monocle magazines
    34. Shopping at a 7-Eleven in East Asia when the jetlag won’t let me get to sleep – its something about the colourful packaging design, retina-toasting lighting and junk food that they sell which fits in with the disconnectedness I feel
    35. The half-awake feeling you have when your duvet feels like you are wrapped in cotton wool
    36. Walking around Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. Its a weird mix of space station and holy place. The light through the stained glass is spectacular
    37. Touch typing on a decent keyboard. How people are supposed to cope with the modern rubbery keys on Apple’s defaults keyboards now I have no idea. How the hell does a keyboard make you happy? I feel at one with the machine, I become less conscious of my own typing. The same goes for using a Kensington Expert Mouse rather than a conventional ‘hockey puck’ or trackpad
    38. Enjoying a modern art exhibition with someone knowledgeable so that you can discuss what you’ve seen
    39. Oil refineries at night, they way they are lit up like fallen down Christmas trees. I love asian cityscapes like Hong Kong island and Tokyo for the information overload and the intricate lights
    40. Going to sleep to the sound of a washing machine, sends me straight off, the white noise seems to give me interesting dreams as well. No idea why
    41. The night sky on  a clear summer night at my uncle’s farm so I can see the delicate star structures
    42. The feeling of smugness that I get after I have cleaned the house from top-to-bottom
    43. Buried in a good book whether its Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, a business book, graphic novel or an old counterculture text
    44. Sitting on my sofa and doing nothing after I have come in from a great night out. I tend to enjoy warehouse and squat parties now more than clubs in London at the moment. Think its the music and the vibe
    45. Finding a really great piece of design, whether its a cool piece of software, website, my Mystery Ranch backpack or accessible product design (like the Red Bull ring-pull with the bull cut out)
    46. Finishing a blog post, particularly if I have been using the post to think a concept out fully. I will often mind-map it in my moleskine as well
    47. Seeing my ideas make a difference, whether its to a clients business, changing the outlook of a course or conference attendee or having someone come up and discuss something articulated on here
    48. Winning an eBay auction, paying less than I had intended to
    49. Going to a really good thought provoking event like LIFT or some of the Barcamps
    50. This has felt like a marathon of a post! The final item in my 50 things that make me happy: when I interact with a bureaucracy and things turn out alright with little-to-no effort

    You’ve heard about the 50 things that make me happy, what would be the 50 things that make you happy?

  • Social web looking backwards and forwards

    I was asked about where I thought social media was going a number of times over recent months. So with that in mind I thought I would throw a distillation of the questions that I have been asked out there and solicit answers from the community. I have put my own responses in italics.

    What do you think that the biggest challenges have been in social media up to now?

    Agencies that don’t get the ‘new’ non-linear multi-channel nature of storytelling, in which storytelling has moved to a multi-way engagement process. Storytelling is becoming less and less of a linear process which you can complete the boxes and then roll-out. From TV dramas like CSI in which non-mainstream plot devices move a story rattling through time and space to digital communications which allow a narrative to be atomised, entered-and-left at any point and remixed by the audience.

    Joseph Campbell’s mono-myth concept doesn’t cope with the digital world that well. In PR terms, storytelling has moved from the traditional Hansel & Gretel bread crumbs analogue exemplified by traditional PR thinking leading the journalist by the nose to a desired end-point; to a lego construction brick analogue where the audience can take the story elements and build their own model without your context. Provide them with the elements, be human, be nice, be useful and if possible remarkable. Provide kudos where it is due and be prepared for a kicking if you deserve it.

    Agencies that cling to the old way of thinking, even as they maybe doing digital work: are setting themselves up for a fall. They are in denial of the changes happening around them. These changes won’t happen overnight, but they are happening; just as in the same way that the car replaced the horse and the airplane replaced the passenger liner. It is doing a disservice to their clients, themselves and their employees.

    The second thing that I find frustrating is more of a tactical item, but shows a lack of thought around how people consume media in a personal way and respecting the audience’s attention. I remain unconvinced by many peoples fixation on digital video production, when they grossly under-estimate the power, popularity and utility of images.

    Thinking about video and audio from a technical point-of-view it can be far from straightforward for a blogger to embed on their site, this is dependant on the platform that they are using and whether they have the right plug-in installed on their blogging software. Posting images is much straightforward.

    content vs attention

    Then there is the covenant made with an audience when you present them with content. Video requires our absolute attention, whereas audio allows us to multi-task (drivetime radio). With text or images we can easily scan to see if the content is of interest and listen to other content or nip back and re-visit content easily at any time. 

    What have you found provided the most excitement and hope in social media up to now?

    The first thing that I have found most exciting and has given me the most hope about social media is the innovative ways that people have used social media for good and the way positive communities form. From customers helping each other out in the absence of proper customer support to charitable giving and the formation of communities of like–minded people. In a world that is increasingly cynical, social media has allowed people to connect in a way that demonstrates the best in people.

    The second item that I have found most exciting is the way that it has become not only easier to publish content but also to integrate that content with great services like Google Earth, Flickr and Yahoo! APIs. Its only a matter of time before PR practitioners master these fully.

    Looking forward at marketing communications and PR: what are the greatest areas of concern?

    Practitioners be it marketers, advertising agencies or PR agencies aren’t learning lessons of etiquette and respect fast enough. I have been really concerned about the ins and outs of the recent #Moonfruit campaign. This moral ambiguity is likely to create a vacuum that regulation could quite easily attempt to fill that void.

    If marketers and PR people continue to abuse the trust of audiences then this will ruin the potential of social media for everybody.

    Looking forward again: what offers the most hope and excitement for the future?

    I want to put the development of the web and social media into some context before I answer this question:

    Changes on the web

    Broadly you can think of the development of the web and social media as we know it as having had three acts:

    • Act one is what most people would call web 1.0 where the web was largely a direct analogue of traditional publishing. Media plaforms cost 100,000s to tens of millions of pounds. From a marketing perspective this was the ‘web as brochure’ and if you were lucky an order form as well
    • Act two is the nebulous web 2.0 or web as a platform. And whilst the best examples of web 2.0 are no longer new, the understanding of them from a marketing and communications point-of-view is still incomplete. Partly because of the shift in mindset required between ‘act one’ and ‘act two’
    • The third act that I think we are entering is the web of data or the web of things. Information is contained in small chunks whether its a twitter update, a QR code or microformat like a hCard. And we can see this atomisation taking place even in press releases if we look at the Todd Defren and the SHIFT team have been modifying their social media template over the past few years

    You can see how the attitude of communicators needed to change with these technical phases:

    Changes in online comms


    The parts that I feel most excited about moving forward for the next few years are:

    • Continuing to think about how social media campaigns can still be useful
    • Thinking about how campaigns can be atomised, still be effective and be refined through improved measurement
    • There are some answers that I don’t get yet, which I think will be interesting to explore in more depth. In particular how atomised data and conversations happening across a plethora of channels are going to affect the context of content, and how that will affect the communications function

    What’s the three biggest lessons that you’ve learned up to now?

    • Goals: always strive be nice, be human, be useful and try to be remarkable in your campaigns
    • Consideration: the cost of content is not only about the monetary cost, but also non-monetary economics: attention and ‘whuffie’. You shouldn’t make a video because you can, but because you are providing the target audience with something which they will find useful or remarkable. The richer the media, the greater the burden of responsibility the communicator has. If you want consumers to respect your brand, respect their time and attention
    • Attitude: stay curious, stay hungry 

    I will tag Stephen Waddington, John Kerr, Doug Winfield, Jonny Rosemont and Adam Parker.

  • Harris’ Law

    I came across Harris’ Law due to Jason Calacanis. Jason Calacanis has touched on the issue of overconnectivity in a recent editon of his email newsletter. It dealt  with more certainty about the adverse social effects that connectivity brings which I first heard raised by Eric Benhamou of 3Com when he spoke about a decade ago in a keynote at Networld+InterOp in Paris.

    Key to the mail was a concept that Calacanis called Harris’ Law (after his friend Josh Harris):

    At some point, all humanity in an online community is lost, and the goal becomes to inflict as much psychological suffering as possible on another person.

    That sounds excessively harsh in most circumstances, since most social networks mirror life and society. Yes 4Chan and 8Chan can have lots of repulsive content on them. This is less about inflicting pain but more about the kind camaraderie that disgusting jokes brought in the school yard. Yes there are too many incidents involving bullying or hate speech on online communities, but it only makes up part of the content on these communities.

    Political groups aren’t motivated by ‘inflicting damage on the opponents, but by their concerns of things going on around them’. Their tribal ‘wars’ are reinforcing the community and manifesting those concerns rather than being purely about inflicting suffering.

    Even communities like Anonymous that seem to be full of pranking rally around some moral causes such as opposing Scientology or the Iranian government’s oppression of protestors.

    I wanted to end this post on a timely reminder which I have taken from Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void fame’s twitter feed:

    “People matter, Objects don’t”. That’s all you need to know about social media.

    Harris’ Law is also a good reminder to think about mental resilience and good hygiene practices with regards online interactions.

    You can subscribe to Jason’s email list here. More related content can be found here.

  • Digital strategist – when do you think the role will be dead?

    I have been thinking about the role of the digital strategist recently, how will it be affected by the ‘lumpy’ nature of innovation and mainstream adoption. When I started in PR many things that were now mainstream were cutting edge: online press rooms, online journalism, sending pitches through by email.

    As the fax machine finally got binned after we forgot how to programme in 100 number to do a fax blast and the press kits folders that used to be stuffed into envelopes became grey with dust in the stationery cupboard, technology started to evolve again.

    The role of a digital strategist is cyclical, but is it economically sustainable as a specialist career?

    With this in mind, I threw it up as a question on twitter as I was putting up a status post, below is the conversation with Stephen Waddington, Chris Reed and James Warren that came out of it.

    r c: Busy on a workback schedule. When do you think the role of a digital strategist will be dead? My money is on soon.

    James Warren: @r_c why soon?

    r c: @jamesdotwarren because if ppl dont understand how to think about it soon they’re roadkill, so less specialist strategic thinking required

    Stephen Waddington: @r_c everyone in PR in comms needs to be a digital strategist. agencies should be reskilling all staff if they haven’t already

    r c: @wadds so the role of the specialist in the area should disappear as it becomes a hygiene factor

    James Warren: @r_c agree, if time froze now. but there’ll always be new ‘digitals’ (technologies, techniques, outlets, opportunities, skills) to master

    r c: @jamesdotwarren these things come in waves, we are near the end of the current one &also much of it is about a state of mind as bits n bytes

    James Warren: @r_c agree it’s about state of mind. but digital won’t stop evolving, not sure we’re at the end of a wave. yet.

    r c: @jamesdotwarren but does it require digitial strategists as a specialism or will it be a hygiene factor 4 all marketers and PRs & planners?

    James Warren: @r_c bit of both. digital fluency is requirement for all, but I still see a role for digital specialists in creating/playing with new stuff

    Chris Reed: @r_c Ah – the generalist specialist debate. Everyone will need digital skills. But some people will always be cutting edge. Same as all PR?

    r c: @Chris_Reed I was thinking about the digital lifecycle: 1997 – press rooms are the new new thing, email woah! 2008 similar parallels

    Chris Reed: @r_c i’m with you now.1997 – Rapid rebuttal unit – now mainstream. Online reputation management soon to be mainstream… So yes, I agree.

    James Warren: @r_c which was my (kind of) point – there’ll always be something else round the corner we’ll need to keep abreast of

    140 characters doesn’t allow you to have a full-on debate but it also focuses the communicator on their core message or soundbite. As for the question, I think that there’s more life in the idea of a digital strategist yet. I am less sure that the continuation of a digital strategist as a discipline is necessarily a good thing. I think that the digital strategist is bad for brands. They focus on the platform over the job to be done. They focus on sales and don’t understand the whole picture of brand marketing.

    Performance marketing favoured by digital strategist types are really sales teams. Just in the same way that businesses moved in the 20th century from being sales culture businesses to marketing led businesses.

    Of course, feel free to add your own comment or twitter @r_c with your viewpoint and I’ll update them here. More related content here.