Ged Carroll

Category: online | 線上 | 온라인으로 | オンライン

The online field has been one of the mainstays since I started writing online in 2003. My act of writing online was partly to understand online as a medium.

Online has changed in nature. It was first a destination and plane of travel. Early netizens saw it as virgin frontier territory, rather like the early American pioneers viewed the open vistas of the western United States. Or later travellers moving west into the newly developing cities and towns from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

America might now be fenced in and the land claimed, but there was a new boundless electronic frontier out there. As the frontier grew more people dialled up to log into it. Then there was the metaphor of web surfing. Surfing the internet as a phrase was popularised by computer programmer Mark McCahill. He saw it as a clear analogue to ‘channel surfing’ changing from station to station on a television set because nothing grabs your attention.

Web surfing tapped into the line of travel and 1990s cool. Surfing like all extreme sport at the time was cool. And the internet grabbed your attention.

Broadband access, wi-fi and mobile data changed the nature of things. It altered what was consumed and where it was consumed. The sitting room TV was connected to the internet to receive content from download and streaming services. Online radio, podcasts and playlists supplanted the transistor radio in the kitchen.

Multi-screening became a thing, tweeting along real time opinions to reality TV and live current affairs programmes. Online became a wrapper that at its worst envelopes us in a media miasma of shrill voices, vacuous content and disinformation.

  • Hawker markets & things this week

    Hawker markets

    Eating out is an important part of life in many Asian countries. Cheap eats in Singapore are provided by hawker markets. Imagine Asian street food, if it was run by Germans. They had a similar tradition to hawkers called da pai dang (大牌檔). But the Hong Kong government has slowly squeezed them out and there are now less than 25 left. Instead I used to usually go to small hole in the wall restaurants. Da pai dang are treasured by Hong Kong citizens; hawker markets are treasured by the Singaporean people and their government. Singaporean channel Our Grandfather Story put together a video on how to support offline hawker markets. Its also a great critique of online food services.

    MiniDisc

    Sony’s MiniDisc format was a fascinating format. Friends of mine used it to record DJ mixes as it gave better quality than cassette taps. But it never beat out the humble compact cassette as a universal media. I went from cassette tapes to recordable CDs. MiniDisc operated in an interesting technological and temporal space.

    It is a very cyberpunk retro-futuristic looking media. The optical disc in the protected diskette case. If you wanted data safe, secure and offline, then this form factor looks sensible. And Sony’s Blu-Ray in a diskette is used for archiving purposes today by Sony and Panasonic under the format name Archival Disc.

    When I look at the MiniDisc, I think of dinky portable player / recorders that were almost like the watch-makers art. If it hadn’t existed, anime and manga artists would have created it as a fictional device.

    It had a second life as a pre-iPod format that offered the shareability of cassette mixtapes.

    The secret life of MiniDisc in Japan is fascinating. All of the above factors and more are featured in this documentary.

    Apple Daily

    Hong Kong’s national security police arrested senior journalists at the Apple Daily.

    Hong Kong police arrest editor-in-chief of Apple Daily newspaper in morning raids | Hong Kong | The Guardian – Steve Li Kwai-wah, head of the police’s national security division, said there was “very strong evidence that the questionable articles played a very crucial part in the conspiracy, which provided ammunition for foreign countries, institutions and organisations to impose sanctions,” adding that those arrested played “a very important role” in their publication. The articles reportedly date back to 2019. Authorities have made repeated assurances since the implementation of the controversial and wide-ranging national security law in June 2020 that it was not retroactive.

    They seized journalist computer hard drives, money and materials. The Apple Daily team didn’t let that hold them back and live-streamed the publication of their early edition of Friday’s paper.

    Hong Kongers came out to support the newspaper, queuing and buying multiple copies of the Apple Daily paper at news stand as soon as the early edition was published.

    They have an English language version of the Apple Daily paper here and I urge you to consider subscribing via the Apple app store or the Google Play store.

    You don’t have to subscribe because the Apple Daily is the lone free voice in Hong Kong media; universally disliked by those in charge (and many who wish they were in charge). You can subscribe for Chinese and Hong Kong coverage that you wouldn’t otherwise see in English language media. Such as Alibaba’s Taobao e-commerce platform having over a billion data records taken. A huge hack not mentioned elsewhere yesterday in the media.

  • Fans + more news

    China is intensifying efforts to check the “chaotic” power of online celebrity fan clubs – Asian fans are something else, so this is not surprising. Asian Fans will spend a fortune on their favourite bands records. They will take out full page newspaper advertisements or billboards wishing their favourite artist happy birthday. In China, the party is always first, not pop stars. Fans will be clamped down on, unless they’re fans of Xi Jingping. More on what Asian fandom here.

    ‘Heavy’ versus ‘Light’ business philosophies in Chinese tech – Chinese Characteristics – really interesting idea to describe culture. Heavy is a business that relies on people to make to ‘make’ the product. TikTok would be heavy. Deepmind would be a light business. Heavy businesses tend to do soft innovation

    Chinese ecommerce site Shein hit with trademark disputes | Financial Times – “As long as they have the audience that they do, they’re going to determine that it’s worth their time and energy to move products as quickly as possible — even if some of those products violate intellectual property norms.” – business as usual in Chia then (paywall)

    Farewell, Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy – The New York Times – Uber journeys subsidised by VC money. I was reminded of the ludicrously low prices of dot.com era e-tailing sites

    Hong Kong star Karen Mok comes under fire in China for wearing Dolce & Gabbana in music video | South China Morning Post – The studio of Hong Kong pop singer Karen Mok has been forced to issue an apology after she prompted controversy on Chinese social media for wearing Dolce & Gabbana in her latest music video. The brand has been seen in some quarters as anti-Chinese following a 2018 controversy over an advertisement that showed an Asian woman trying to eat pizza and spaghetti with chopsticks. The adverts were criticised by mainland audiences for “publicly insulting China” and the crisis escalated after an online leak of screenshots from a private conversation showed Stefano Gabbana, the brand’s co-founder, making insulting remarks about the country. Gabbana and the brand’s co-founder Domenico Dolce eventually issued a public apology. – how fragile is the Chinese collective ego? This makes China look weak.

    The Telegram Billionaire and His Dark Empire – DER SPIEGEL – interesting if dramatic profile of Telegram messaging platform

    Japan’s Perceptions of Otaku: Then and Now – The Tokusatsu Network – interesting change in media and consumer attitudes to otaku. More people self identify as otaku, so the media has had to change. More Japan related content here.

    Retail Could Have A Bigger Comeback Than Expected. Here’s Why. – Robb Report – interesting US estimates – the National Retail Federation revised up its annual outlook: It predicted that retail sales will now grow between 10.5 percent and 13.5 percent to the range of $4.44 trillion to $4.56 trillion. That compares with $4.02 trillion in retail sales last year

    Brown Thomas and Arnotts could be changing owners – I wouldn’t be surprised if LVMH’s DFS business didn’t bid for Brown Thomas. Ireland is too small a market (even with tourists) for single brand boutiques

    Wikipedia’s Surprising Power in Shaping Science: A New MIT Shows How Wikipedia Shapes Scientific Research | Open Culture 

  • Web response times & things this week

    Web response times

    I have been working with colleagues on a point of view that is impacted by web response times. During the research aspect of this work I came across this video by Jakob Nielsen which explained web response times really well.

    Web response time resources

    Ralph Bakshi

    I might have mentioned once or twice how I like Ralph Bakshi’s fantasy films: The Lord of The Rings, Wizards and Fire and Ice. Bakshi used rotoscoping in ways that other directors have never managed to provide a unique animation experience that modern technology can’t beat.

    Forging Through the Darkness talks about Bakshi’s career

    Bakshi was making his DIY career back before computers or social platforms. Watching this film and seeing Bakshi’s punk-like attitude makes your Tik-Tok efforts seem lame by comparison. Secondly, a lot of the early opportunities that Bakshi got in animation are no longer available as the work would have been outsourced to India, China, Taiwan or Vietnam.

    The second film places Bakshi’s role in the animation in terms of the parallel track it takes to the New Hollywood movement that came to the fore in the early 1970s and finished with Heaven’s Gate.

    I was watching Nausicaä Of The Valley Of The Wind with a friend over the weekend and saw some visual similarities to Bakshi’s Wizards. According to IMDB Nausicaä Of The Valley Of The Wind was produced in 1984, some seven years after Bakshi’s Wizards.

    Japan population decline and relationship with the city

    Open culture have an article on the ghost towns of Japan. While Tokyo feels as busy as ever. There are small towns and rural areas that have become depopulated.

    I love the video made of a man who has turned a school building that no longer has children into a hostel, café and jam space for bands.

    While we’re on Japan. The 2002 documentary Tokyo Noise looks at how different Japanese artists experience, understand, interact and are inspired by Tokyo. It also covers a diverse range of issues including robotics and Shintoism.

    More Japan related content here.

    Are you scared yet, human?

    Panorama ran a documentary that feels like Adam Curtis doing a programme for the BBC’s Horizon series that explores the area of machine learning. You can argue about the content of the film, but it has provided a base level of understanding on the area to the general public. Politicians watching this show will feel as if they are industry experts as the closing credits roll; instead of viewing it as a starting point for wider reading. I think that this might set the tone in terms of regulation for many years to come.

    It misses AI winters and the fact that the technology is only ‘smart’ in very narrow areas. For instance, understanding content and autonomous driving both have their stubborn problems. It misses the fact that what we see now is based on thinking coming out of Canadian academia in the 1980s, that hasn’t been moved on much further.

    https://youtu.be/P1VKB0u86Qs

    As cryptocurrency has shown there are physical limits to how much computing power that can be thrown at a machine learning problem.

    Technology is a threat in the hands of authoritarian regimes. A classic example of this is the relationship that the Nazis had with IBM.

    Finally, I will leave you with a nicely done public safety video coming out of Denmark about the need for wearing helmets when riding a vehicle (or a horse).

  • Eliot Higgins & things from last week

    Eliot Higgins

    Eliot Higgins talks about the origins of Bellingcat. The investigations that Bellingcat has done to date and some of the techniques that it uses in investigations. Higgins has written an account of Bellingcat which goes into open source intelligence and new investigative journalist techniques. Bellingcat are also famous for their courses, where they pass on their expertise in open source investigations.

    The Go! Team

    The Go! Team released a new video which makes good use of a photocopier effect to animate the band members. Pow is the usual mix of genre bending power pop that The Go! Team are known for.

    SK-II

    SK-II has commissioned some lovely films to support their ‘Change Destiny’ brand purpose. You have a mix of gaming, 3D animation and anime in these films. Working on Dove, there was the mantra real women; which went into the core of the brand’s creative. But that misses the online world which we now operate in and is often more keyed into our inner world than the real life around us. SK-II is owned by Procter & Gamble; who have been making leaps and bounds in terms of their approach to brand purpose. More related posts here.

    https://youtu.be/pguAbHCrxzA
    https://youtu.be/pmZr-AcYQs8

    This was something I hadn’t come across before, in 1974 a set of 4 LP records were released that had actor Nicol Williamson reading The Hobbit. Williamson is better known for his role of Merlin in Excalibur. One of his last film appearances of Williamson was the role of Cogliostro in the 1997 live action adaption of Spawn. This film is still vastly underrated. Williamson left us in 2011. This recording just hints at his acting skill. During the 1960s and 1970s he was considered one of the greatest actors of his generation alongside Albert Finney which is high praise.

  • The Exponential Era by Espindola & Wright

    The Exponential Era is a business strategy book published by the IEEE Press as part of its series on technology, innovation and leadership. David Espindola and Michael Wright work at Intercepting Horizons and advise at the University of Minnesota.

    The book is a concise 182 pages including its index. It has a satisfying hard cover about the height and width of a paperback book. The book proportions reminded of many of the books that we used to have my secondary school’s library. It felt right in my hand. Its a small thing, but it matters.

    The exponential era

    The secondary school analogy goes further; the book summarises knowledge and makes it relatively easily digestible.

    The Exponential Era includes:

    • The threat of platforms and their ability to disrupt market sectors
    • Why people find it hard to grasp the change brought about by the future
    • Megatrends with the kind of utopian tone that reminded me of Alvin Toffler, George Gilder and John Naisbitt
    • Horizon monitoring
    • Agile approach to development
    • Test and learn
    • Feedback based strategic decisions which relies extensively on the technology sector’s fetishisation of John Boyd’s OODA model
    • The Innovator’s Dilemma
    • Future business ethics

    The book consolidates the kind of reading that people in technology and marketing would likely have read anyway. Chances are if you’ve already read books like Saving Big Blue, Measure What Matters, The Lean Startup and Zero to One, then The Exponential Era isn’t written for you.

    Who should read this book?

    Instead this book seems to be an increasingly diminished audience. A company too small for it’s management to have been lectured on disruption by McKinsey, Bain, BCG or Accenture. But still large enough to be concerned. Like McKinsey et al Espindola and Wright are looking to create disruption fear and sell their SPX methodology to re-engineer their business. I would have thought the c suite in most businesses would have at least done enough reading to have a high level understanding of the content in the book.

    The book’s relentless utopian optimism reminded me a lot of business works from the 1970s to the dot com era. I think that The Exponential Era will be of most use to junior people at the start of their career looking for a primer rather than its intended audience.