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.

  • Debt defaults + more things

    China’s richest tycoons hit by debt defaults, arrests and suicides in 2019 amid tightening regulation | South China Morning Post  – billionaire’s problems, but an interesting read. A lot of Chinese corporates haven’t adapted well to the slow down in growth. Secondly, many of them have been caught in Xi’s prosecution of corrupt government officials (with an apparent focus on corrupt people who are also potential rivals). Finally whilst the government has talked about being behind private industry; it has exerted pressure on private enterprises and favoured state owned enterprises. What’s going to be scary is international exposure to these debt defaults

    Jack Ma
    Jack Ma by JD Lasica

    eMarketer Instagram User Forecast Estimates Q4 2019 – eMarketer Trends, Forecasts & Statistics – law of big numbers kicks in

    B2B Marketing Trends | LinkedIn Marketing Solutions – I need to go through this in more depth

    In strategic Djibouti, a microcosm of China’s growing foothold in Africa – The Washington Post – yet another example of China government backed financing of loans is making a difference

    I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left. – My solution was to advocate for the adoption of a company-wide, formal Human Rights Program that would publicly commit Google to adhere to human rights principles found in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, provide a mechanism for product and engineering teams to seek internal review of product design elements, and formalize the use of Human Rights Impact Assessments for all major product launches and market entries. 
    But each time I recommended a Human Rights Program, senior executives came up with an excuse to say no. At first, they said human rights issues were better handled within the product teams, rather than starting a separate program. But the product teams weren’t trained to address human rights as part of their work. When I went back to senior executives to again argue for a program, they then claimed to be worried about increasing the company’s legal liability     – Google seems to have a right dumpster fire going on in the reputation space

    China’s 7 Wealthy Consumer Types | Jing Daily – some conclusive differences between China’s rich and those in the U.S. (a good standard for Western wealth). One notable difference is the age of wealthy consumers. In China, 80 percent are under the age of 45 while that age accounts for just 30 percent of wealthy citizens in the U.S. (that number is even lower in many European countries.) The Chinese side also placed significantly higher values on products’ functional benefits rather than their emotional benefits, which was the exact opposite of U.S.-based respondents. Lastly, trust in foreign brands and trust in internet/social media advertising are both much higher for Chinese HNWI – More luxury related content here

  • Truth decay

    Truth decay was a concept that I came across when reading Monocle’s Forecast issue.

    Donald Trump
    President Donald Trump

    Michael D Rich is the head of the The RAND Corporation – a not-for-profit think tank. When he was interviewed and described as being preoccupied with ‘truth decay’. Truth decay occurs when society and the body politic can’t even agree on basic facts.

    • Increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data
    • A blurring of the line between opinion and fact
    • The increasing relative volume and resulting influence of opinion and personal experience over fact
    • Declining trust in formerly respected sources of facts

    Truth decay. One point that we’ve made over and over again is that no important problem can be solved in the US within the span of just a four-year presidency or a two-year Congress. And the way those problems have been surmounted in the past is consensus and compromise. That’s impossible if two sides can’t agree on the basic facts.

    Thought Leaders – The Forecast 2020 Monocle magazine

    All of this sounds like the rhetoric used to describe Vladislav Surkov and his work for the Russian government, or Dominic Cummings and Cambridge Analytica. The idea is that language and truth no longer mean anything. There is no right, there is no left, there is no ideology except the other group and the desire for power.

    The RAND Corporation is America’s foremost think tank. It spun out of Douglas Aircraft Corporation. From national security it expanded to social and economic areas. It now has its own grad school and nine different research facilities. It’s website is a good source of resources across a range of areas.

  • Treasure hunt

    Treasure hunt

    Treasure hunt as defined by NPD is the process of consumers bargain hunting. It might be discounted pricing on items or looking for substitute pre-owned products.

    Sale
    Sale

    Discounted items used to be seen in the retail trade as the preserve of older consumers alongside couponing. But as empirical experience going along to discount outlets show bargain hunters reach across social classes, income levels and age groups. Discounted products accounted for 3 percent growth in retail, even while retail declined by 1 percent overall in the last quarter.

    There hasn’t been as much of an exploration into whether its the discounts that people want or whether its the thrill of the hunt itself, especially when Google makes it much easier online.

    As for pre-owned goods, whilst NPD thinks that this is a millennial trait – vintage clothing stores, crate digging for records and and eBay are evidence that this trait isn’t new. I was reminded of being told that the collective memory is about eight years or so. So this explains how trends come back and get regurgitated or remixed by trendspotters and agencies.

    Admittedly the motivation that they are ascribing to vintage shopping by millennials and gen-z adds environmental aspects to vintage consumption. (Though is probably quality aspects as well as apparel globalisation and fast fashion have gone hand-in-hand in the demand for heirloom design).

  • Machines for emoting

    Machines for emoting

    Machines for emoting, is the problem of our internet in the palm of our hands? Over the past few years the sentiment towards the internet has changed dramatically.

    iPhone

    Before the internet

    Going back to the 1960s, my parents told me about the ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’ signs. These were found in many British towns at the same time that hippies were advocating peace and love. And when Enoch Powell made his rivers of blood speech; 70 percent of British people surveyed agreed with him.

    Real world media and underground subcultures traded blows over racism at a slower pace. Though many of those blows were real.

    Is it the internet?

    This is no longer the information superhighway of Al Gore. The reasons for the changes aren’t obvious. One popular narrative is that algorithms are to blame. It is common to hear that narrative in news media.

    But academic research suggests that it isn’t ‘radicalisation’ by algorithms isn’t true.

    Is it the devices we use?

    There were smartphones before the iPhone. They were made by numerous companies including Nokia, Palm, SonyEricsson, Panasonic and even Microsoft (who partnered with a number of manufacturers). In Japan, NTT DoCoMo put the ‘smart’ in the network through iMode rather than building a mini-PC in the phone itself.

    Smartphones had initially started with business users and gradually broadened its base. Quite early on, phones focused on social functions, a classic example would be Danger’s Sidekick model which was designed for messaging. Nokia first popularised the app store and security signed apps that Apple and Google built upon.

    The move to the ‘pictures under glass’ interface that we now know from Android and iPhone devices coincided with a surge on social.

    Social media existed before 2010, but not as we now know it. Few of us had smartphones in 2009. Facebook’s active user base has grown sevenfold over the past 10 years, and there simply aren’t enough people for that to happen again. Instagram and WhatsApp were both launched about a decade ago, and swiftly absorbed into the mother of all social networks. As for Twitter, let me simply note that Donald Trump only started tweeting in earnest in 2011.

    Tim Hartford in the FT

    Did the pictures under glass metaphor and apps designed to utilise it make social too easy to share? It allows people to emote. From mild emotions usually expressed with emoticons or GIFs to visceral anger that seems to flood Twitter – there seems to be evidence of correlation if not causality. So how can design slow the hose pipe down to encourage more considered responses?

    If that’s the case then user experience design has to play a part in resolving some of the worst issues online, given that people can’t seem to be able to respond appropriately by moderating their behaviour.

  • Open source 5G + more things

    Pentagon wants open-source 5G plan in campaign against Huawei – ok in theory only. Open source 5G including OpenRAN doesn’t provide the flexibility in installation that vendor solutions do. More related content here.

    It Seemed Like a Popular Chat App. It’s Secretly a Spy Tool. – The New York Times – Emirati’s do with Totok what the Chinese have been doing for years with WeChat TOMS/Skype etc. Totok is apparently popular in Qatar as it allows VoIP without a VPN – so expat workers use it to connect with their families at home.

    Totok messenger

    Made in America – On US staffed hacking team in UAE. Interesting investigation by Reuters

    The decade of the drop: why do we still stand in line? | How To Spend It – experience. It’s diametrically opposite to one stop shopping

    Apple Captures 66% of the Smartphone Industry’s Profits in Q3 leaving all of their Competitors Combined in the Dust – Patently Apple – it is becoming a challenge for Chinese smartphone brands to increase their smartphone ASPs and margins due to a combination of longer consumer holding periods and Apple lowering pricing on some key SKUs, which has limited the headroom that Chinese vendors had used to increase their ASPs – in the long term Huawei having to be vertically integrated all the way up the stack could be to their benefit

    Nike’s Jordan brand just had its first billion-dollar quarter — Quartz – interesting that it has taken over 30 years to get to a billion dollar quarter, yet Jordan is at least ten years past its cultural peak

    In Focus: Pet Shop Boys 6th December 2019 | Listen on NTS – amazing delve into their career

    Reality TV stars auditioned to ‘promote’ poison diet drink on Instagram – BBC News – Oh my gosh, this is as good as watching re-runs of Brass Eye

    Pig Irons at the ‘Plex | Margins – essay on consulting firms well worth reading

    Gildo Zegna: tailoring masculinity for changing tastes | Financial Times – luxury goods industry is feeling the heat of technological disruption, social upheaval and identity politics. Furthermore, within the high end fashion industry few items of clothing are facing more pressure from falling consumer demand than the one that made the Zegna family rich: the traditional men’s suit. “The big challenge we face is a rethinking of masculinity,” he says. – I think streetwear is interesting because of the reassurance it provides on masculinity. The basics of streetwear go back to the mid-century sports basics. The hooded top, jeans, t-shirts, plaid shirts, Letterman jacket, track jacket etc

    Facebook awaits EU opinion in privacy case | Financial Times – interesting how wide the impact of this case could be in terms of things like credit card transaction data etc. (paywall)

    Aito.ai – Introducing a new database category – the predictive database – hmmm

    A Surveillance Net Blankets China’s Cities, Giving Police Vast Powers – The New York Times – Chinese authorities are knitting together old and state-of-the-art technologies — phone scanners, facial-recognition cameras, face and fingerprint databases and many others — into sweeping tools for authoritarian control, according to police and private databases examined by The New York Times. Once combined and fully operational, the tools can help police grab the identities of people as they walk down the street, find out who they are meeting with and identify who does and doesn’t belong to the Communist Party. The United States and other countries use some of the same techniques to track terrorists or drug lords. Chinese cities want to use them to track everybody.

    Is LVMH’s Digital Transformation Working? | Luxury Society – “Over the last few years our market has become highly fragmented,” it added. “Customer journeys and purchasing habits have become more complex. Now, in addition to magazines and other traditional media, our customers – especially young people – use a range of digital options to stay informed, communicate with friends and shop. Brand awareness and customer engagement are built on these many different touchpoints.”