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.
Wunderman Thompson Intelligence highlighted digital sustainability as a trend. The internet is the seventh biggest polluter in the world. Data centres energy consumption is comparable to that of the largest ships.
Web designers have been looking to do their part by designing leaner, faster web pages that take up less memory.
Samsung is looking at up cycling its smartphones providing longevity rather than built-in obsolescence.
https://youtu.be/m9AL266C0lc
Ecosia, Bing and DuckDuckGo sell themselves as a more eco-friendly search engine. Due to the level of ad targeting technology, a Google search uses four times as much energy per search.
Cryptocurrency mining consumes more energy than Argentina and is increasing. That doesn’t take into account the maintenance of a blockchain: the distributed database to support each cryptocurrency transaction.
Performance per watt
Digital sustainability isn’t necessarily a new idea. A veteran Apple user would remember the launch of Intel processors on the Mac at the 2005 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Jobs talks about the company’s focus on performance per watt as a key reason for the transition. Intel was thinking about processors for workstations and mobile computers, while the Power PC was being refocused on its minicomputer heartland and embedded applications.
The problem is that a lot of Apples current product designs from AirPods to MacBook Pros make up cycling all but impossible. Apple does have some interesting technology to recycle their own phones, but we don’t know how that will scale to create real digital sustainability. More related posts here.
China and the UK test HSBC Bank divided loyalties in Hong Kong — Quartz – If HSBC Bank were to spin off its China operations, it wouldn’t be the first bank to reconfigure its ties due to a changed political situation. In the 1980s, the British banks Barclays and Standard Chartered pulled out of direct operations in South Africa amid global pressure against the apartheid regime. The bank’s actions “highlighted…the fact that financial institutions were not unassailable when faced with public pressure on ethical issues. HSBC Bank is betting that the screwing China will give it is still better than the west, more from the FT here: HSBC Bank shifts ‘heart of business’ to Asia in latest strategy revamp | Financial Times
Book Review: Rural Youth Key to China’s Human Capital Crisis – Caixin Global – Rural China is so systematically neglected that it has become nearly invisible not only to most outside observers but even to urban elites within China. But this “invisible” part of China will determine its economic future. Instead of sitting in an ivory tower advising Chinese officials what to do, the authors and their team at Stanford University’s Rural Education Action Program (REAP) have been helping China’s rural youth on the ground in practical and realistic ways
Exclusive: Scientists at top British universities worked with Chinese nuclear weapons researchers – Scientists at Britain’s leading universities – including Cambridge, Edinburgh and Manchester – have worked on a string of projects with researchers at China’s nuclear weapons research institution – it doesn’t necessarily mean that they were helping the Chinese build a new generation of warheads but its not a good look
Consumer behaviour
Cultural Differences May Affect The Outcome Of A Pandemic: New Research : Goats and Soda : NPR – Tight cultures tend to have had a lot of threat in their histories from Mother Nature, like disasters, famine and pathogen outbreaks, and non-natural threats such as invasions on their territory. And the idea is when you have a lot of collective threat you need strict rules. They help people coordinate and predict each other’s behavior. So, in a sense, you can think about it from an evolutionary perspective that following rules helps us to survive chaos and crisis
Notice, Shift, and Rewire: Starting the Journey to Dismantle White Supremacy | by Anna Madill | Feb, 2021 | B The Change – interesting read. What struck me is how much this goes against efficiency and effectiveness in terms of everything one would have been taught in business management, to focus on what I’d call internal quality. It is predicated on a sufficiently slow rate of environmental change / client demands in order to allow this to happen. It is an ideal work environment (and I don’t mean that in the terms that they define it) but in a more general sense. It goes against the grain of the observations of James Gleick in his work Faster
Nexta media operation and its role in the Belarus protests was the main article in this weekend’s FT magazine.
https://flic.kr/p/2kFJwGZ
FT magazine on Nexta
A few things about the article. The old maxim of ‘hearts and minds‘ is still true despite technology. Secondly, Belarus seems to view media and propaganda as a tactic rather than something strategic. This surprised me given that Belarus has always been authoritarian in nature and Soviet in terms of the way it operated. It is at odds with the way countries like Vietnam and China operate.
Finally, the irony that the smartphone is the instrument of protest. Nexta seem surprisingly well organised in a way that wasn’t seen with voices around the Hong Kong protests.
YouTube has a lot of digitised archive footage. First up is unused footage shot in 1962 filmed for a Pathé film This is Hong Kong.
The next reel was shot six years later. Again it was footage that ended up on the cutting room floor of Pathé. The footage was shot for one of its Colour Pictorial episodes. These were film magazines that screened prior to the main feature film in a cinema. Television would be soon squeezing cinema as the main form of video based news and documentaries.
Some of this footage was familiar to me from my times going and living in Hong Kong, whilst other aspects of it were unrecognisable. Both of these films reminded me of Miroslav Sasek’s book This is Hong Kong.
Japan
This footage is said to be taken in Tokyo, Osaka and the countryside in Japan during the 1980s. Though the airplane through bamboo scaffolding footage from 0.23 – 0.25 seems to have been taken on the run in to Hong Kong’s old Kai Tak airport. Some of it is beautifully shot.
It is underpinned by a an ambient track that works really well.
ASICS have put together a film to promote the shoe.
Berocca integration of radio and voice services
Finally Berocca did an innovative radio advert to take advantage of voice services as part of its radio advertising campaign. Alexa has a well documented API stack for building skills, which is what Berocca is encouraging consumers to use. I could see this happening more as Alexa is rolled out in automotive environments.
Korean American security researcher Brian Pak looked at Clubhouse and some of the findings were very interesting. Pak posted a full analysis in Korean here. The key takeouts for me where:
Some (probably early adopter) Koreans have been buying used iPhones so that they can try Clubhouse, since the app is currently iOS only.
The concept of an audio chat app that isn’t new. Pak identified Clubhouse’s key strength as having an intuitive UI/UX and a large number of participants from various backgrounds.
I found it interesting that Pak felt there might be technical difficulties in having Clubhouse for desktop (macOS / Windows) or Android. I suspect that the reason was more about managing the scaling of the app.
Clubhouse is a closer to a mashup than a ‘real app’. It’s voice functions are based on Agora, a Chinese provider. Most of the rest of the features are using the Pubnub communications service platform. The way protocols have been handled was highlighted as a security risk. Stanford Internet Observatory got into this in more detail here.
I can also recommend this coverage about how Clubhouse usage has evolved in Hong Kong, China, Japan and Nigeria.
There was a major fall of snow in the US last week. It unfolded as a catastrophe across Texas. NBC’s New York affiliate set up a live stream at New York’s Time Square. It is amazing to zone out and watch. It could be considered to another entry in the slow TV genre pioneered by Norway’s public broadcaster NRK.
I watched Adam Curtis’ Can’t Get You Out Of My Head last week and wanted to track down some of the films in it. Here are some of them.
Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain was a film about opposition to the Japanese invasion of China. filmed during the pre-communist phase of China.
Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy is a Communist propaganda film describing how a communist infiltrated a bandit gang and helped the communists to destroy them. It was apparently based on an incident that happened during the Chinese civil war. Like the other Communist films featured here, it is extremely stylised using Peking opera techniques mixed with ballet.
https://youtu.be/CsPAHrTMvxw
A ‘slave’ girl on Hainan island runs away and joins a female group of communist soldiers who are fighting a local warlord in The Red Detachment Of Women. The film was made just prior to the cultural revolution at Shanghai Tian Ma studio.
https://youtu.be/zoPM9d18e9o
Finally The East Is Red is musical dramatising from the Chinese communist party perspective; the decline of the Qing dynasty through to the communist takeover.
The original film was produced in 1965, right before the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The prologue seems to have been added after the ‘Gang of Four’ were put on trial. There is certainly a touch of the classic MGM musical to the production style, alongside Beijing opera and ballet.
Filipino brand Jollibee did a pandemic themed Valentine short films which was really clever. All of the films were made by local directors and are emblematic of the COVID-19 experience. Tonally it hits the right spot for the Philippines. What might seem to be too cute and emotional for UK audiences resonates well in that market. Thankfully, it isn’t the tear-jerking emotional rollercoaster that Thai ads can take you on.
I particularly like the second one because of the twist in the plot.
Jollibee’s overall approach on brand as media makes sense when you think about the nature of the Philippines media market and the good number of diaspora that they need to reach.
User domestication was an interesting phrase that I noticed in an essay about the growth of WhatsApp. In the essay the author highlighted a number of factors in WhatsApp’s success:
Having a proprietary messaging client that didn’t support industry standards for messaging such as the XMPP protocol supported by Google Talk. (Google later abandoned the XMPP open protocol itself in favour of its proprietary Google Hangouts).
WhatsApp had a low learning curve of adoption through to a well designed user experience.
The user experience of WhatsApp was easy to learn
WhatsApp worked across both Android and iOS devices which helped its adoption through network effects
This led to a number of things, which the author identified as user domestication factors:
A high level of user dependence on WhatsApp
No control over the software. (it can’t be modified, it prevents migration to another platform – a la Facebook and people’s address book)
Exploitation of ‘captive users’ who would find it difficult to resist
If all of this sounds familiar, its because it was the Facebook playbook from the get-go. Like organising export of your address book from Yahoo! to Facebook, but not the other way around.
https://flic.kr/p/a5fa5N
Captured attention
The author makes clear that WhatsApp is just an illustrative example.
This probably explains why the essay doesn’t seem to match up with the WhatsApp story pre-Facebook. Founders Brian Acton and Jan Koum originally had a nominal subscription model. Acton went on to help set up the Signal Foundation, after leaving WhatsApp post Facebook takeover. His reason for leaving was concerns over the monetisation of WhatsApp by Facebook.
But I think that there can be little argument that Facebook thought of WhatsApp as a user domestication opportunity.
The relationship that the media industry has with consumers through the use of DRM (digital rights management) is a similar form of user domestication mentioned in his essay.
Another example of this ‘user domestication’ in action is the apparent failure of Google’s search choice screen to have any effect on its monopoly market share in Europe.
It differs from previous generations of technology lock-in exercised by the likes of Microsoft, IBM and Apple in that the costs of these obvious upfront. In user domestication, the costs are less apparent and the value extraction happens on an ongoing basis.