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.

  • 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.

  • Inspirational communicators

    Wadds asked me on a meme to name three inspirational communicators, as part of a meme, this is how it started:

    The idea’s simple. We’re asking you to list the three communicators living or dead who have most influenced your way of thinking professionally and perhaps personally too. Who do you think the real innovators are? Who’s been most responsible for kicking the industry forward? And just who are the communication PRunks?

    My thoughts below:

    • Steve Jobs is the master communicator if you look at his whole career, he convinced Steve Wozniak to work engineering miracles that laid the foundation for Apple Computer, sweet-talked John Sculley to leave PepsiCo at a time when technology wasn’t on the radar of career-conscious corporate American executives and the soap opera he has orchestrated since he returned to Apple in 1997.  Jobs knows when to use silence and the void, so when Apple speaks the world listens, you can see a communications strategy being rolled out that owes more to Sun Tzu’s Art of War than a marketing professor. He also realises that every point of customer touch is a communication, not just the press release.
    • Stewart Brand

      My fascination with the history of technology has gone along in step with fascination with counterculture. I finished reading  Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism on a flight over to Hong Kong in January. I had been aware of Brand through Wired articles and was vaguely aware of the Whole Earth Catalog and the Long Now Foundation. Brand has been a communicator at the nexus between the counterculture generation of the 1960s, the computer industry and the the online world we know today. It was his lobbying that was partly responsible for the release of the first picture from space showing the whole of the earth. That picture triggered the modern environmental movement as people realised the fragility of our existence in the vast emptiness of the cosmos. The Whole Earth Catalog that he founded was the Wikipedia of its day, hippy communes found out how to do handy skills and build geodesic domes, he was a founder of The WELL – (The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) an online social network that brought together some of the key personalities of the modern ‘net. I also believe that his famous Environmental Heresies essay in the MIT Technology Review will be looked back on as a turning point in green politics. Without Brand there probably wouldn’t be digital marketing based on social principles the way we know it.

    • Micheál O’Hehir,  was dubbed “The Voice of the GAA”, (GAA is the Gaelic Athletics Association).  The excitement and energy of commentaries on RTE radio talking about GAA football and hurling matches fired my imagination as a boy and are still a pleasure to listen to now.  O’Hehir made his commentaries into to stories that conveyed the excitement that he felt about the game, he had what my Mam and Dad would call the ‘gift of the gab‘ – he was the modern day equivalent of the family member or neighbour who would come into a house in the evening and tell stories by the hearth to keep everyone entertained. In a household that disliked sport in general as a waste of time, O’Hehir’s commentary was one of the few sporting relics welcome. As a young boy growing up in an Irish household in the North West of England his commentaries also helped me to identify with who I am and where I came from.

    Tagging Rachel Lee, Giles Shorthouse and Jonathan Hopkins.

  • The PowerBook

    PR Week (subscription required) published the PowerBook this week, featuring 500 of the most prominent people in PR, it had a selection of questions that painted an interesting portrait of the people listed. BlackBerry’s at the ready, with leisure time facilitated by iPods and TiVo-equipped home entertainment systems, they are used to dining in London’s best restaurants – there wasn’t too many surprises amongst the preferences of the 500.

    It also struck me that the same questions could paint an interesting picture of the digital marketing blogosphere. What would my own responses look like?

    Name: Ged Carroll

    Job: Lead consultant (EMEA), Digital Strategies Group

    Address: Waggener Edstrom Worldwide 10 Southampton Street London WC2E 7HA

    Telephone: +44 20 7632 3800

    Born: 19XX

    Home town: That’s a complex question. The place I felt most at home is Hong Kong. I grew up in the north west of England and the ancestral family farm in the west of Ireland. For better or worse, London is where currently where I call home.

    Lives: London

    Family: No

    Best career move: Getting made redundant from my blue-collar job in the oil industry, which set me on my current career path. Little did I know what that would entail.

    Which company / brand do you most admire? Rolex

    Which business / organisation leader do you most admire? Larry Weber – who was the first agency leader that I worked for. It also reminded me that its disappointing to meet your heroes. He is a lovely, but far from perfect character.

    Boss who most inspired you: Cathy Pittham, who was the managing director of the first agency I worked for down in London.

    Most essential read: Wired magazine

    Most essential viewing / listening: Wall Street Journal Tech News Briefing podcast

    Favourite web link: pbs.org/cringely

    Favourite gadget: Apple MacBook Pro

    Most respected journalist: Robert X. Cringely (aka Mark Stephens)
    Most respected politician: A toss up between former president Mary Robinson, Moshe Dayan and Michael Collins (and yes I do know the last two are dead).

    What is your favourite place for lunch? Wagamama

    Name one thing about yourself that may surprise others: I used to be a shift leader in an oil refinery

    Guilty pleasure: too many to mention including vinyl records, streetwear and mechanical watches

    Your ideal epitaph: to not have an epitaph, at least not for a good while.

  • Four Things

    Drew B has linked to me in a meme called 4 things. In this people who have been linked to name a number of different items in groups of four and then link to four other blogs that they know of that could continue this one.In typical Wired reader style, this concept of an idea that can be communicated is called a meme (and memes are often written about in digerati circles).

    Classic memes that non-geeks would have heard of include the ‘Frankie Says’ series of t-shirts and ‘No, but Yeah’, but No dialogue from Little Britain.

    Why 4?

    Three or six are the perfect numbers according to a discussion between Lee van Cleef and Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Wikipedia couldn’t shed any light on it either.

    Four jobs I’ve had

    Agency drone – at present
    Shift leader     – heading up a shift team on the bitumen plant in what was then UK’s second smallest oil refinery
    DJ     – up north, and a few times in London
    On the line     – in a meat packing plant and various other factories as a student

    Four movies I can watch over and over

    All the Presidents Men

    The Dollars Trilogy (particularly For a Few Dollars More)

    The Usual Suspects

    Silmido

    Four TV shows I love to watch

    I don’t have a television but I do have a soft spot for vintage shows, here’s four that came to mind:

    Four places I’ve visited on holiday

    • Dublin
    • Leiden
    • Ibiza
    • Paris

    Four favourite dishes

    • As my mate Griff would say ‘a big bowl of fuck-off’ (a ramen noodle dish from Wagamamas)
    • A decent Irish fried breakfrast with proper black and white pudding and a side serving of soda bread
    • Rhubarb crumble
    • A well done tuna steak

    Four places I’ve lived

    • Liverpool
    • Galway
    • London
    • Huddersfield

    4 sites I visit daily

    It would actually be a hell of a lot more than this but: Slate.com, Wired.com, RTE.ie and ThinkSecret.com

    Four places I’d rather be

    Singapore, in a coffee shop, record shopping, sat in front of a range enjoying a turf fire