Category: oprah time | 書評 | 서평 : 文芸批評

Welcome! I guess the first question that you have is why oprah time? Well in my last year of college I used to sit in the house that I shared with my landlord and write my essays whilst watching cable TV.

There I would be sipping tea, writing away and referencing from text books spread around me on the couch and coffee table. One of the programmes on the in the background was Oprah Winfrey. A lot of the show was just background noise. But I was fascinated by Oprah’s book club.

She’d give her take on a book, maybe interview the author. And then it would be blasted up the New York Times bestsellers list. This list appears weekly in the New York Times Book Review. Oprah’s book club was later emulated by other talk show hosts, notably the UK’s Richard Madeley and Judy Finegan.

On the high end you had Melvyn Bragg‘s South Bank Show when they profiled an author of the moment.

When I came to writing my own review of books that I’d read, I was was brought back to that time working on a sofa. Apple laptop in hand. It made sense to go with Oprah time.

You might also notice a link called bookshelf. This is a list of non-fiction books that I have kept. And the reasons why I have kept them.

If you’ve gone through my reviews and think that you’d like to send me a book to review. Feel free to contact me. Click this link, prove that you’re human and you will have my email address.

Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte

Strictly speaking this is a bit different from when I have written about books. This is the second time that I read Being Digital, the first time was during my final year in college.

I was curious to know how the book would hold up in the space of 20 years since it was first published. In twenty years we’ve seen televisions shrink as we moved from cathode ray tubes to plasma and LCD displays. The cost of telephone calls has declined, cellphones are really no longer phones but a type of mobile computer that happens to do voice calls poorly. The dominant form of personal computing is Android rather than Windows. The internet has facilitated a raft of services that used to exist in the real world or didn’t exist previously.

In the subsequent 20 years Negroponte has gone from being one of digital’s poster children with a column in Wired and his leading role at MIT Media Lab to a more obscure position in digital history. His biography over at MIT has him listed as sitting on the board of Motorola Inc.

It is easy to dismiss his showmanship and bluster, but the Negroponte did work that foreshadowed in-car sat navigation devices, Google Street View and the modern stylus-less touch screen.

The book first of all emphasises how far we have come when it talks about 9600 baud connections, I am writing this post sat on the end of an internet connection that provides 50mbps download and 10mbps upload – and that’s slow compared to the speeds that I enjoyed in Hong Kong. Negroponte envisioned that satellites would have a greater role in internet access than it seems to currently have, cellular networks seem to have brought that disruption instead.

It has the tone of boundless optimism that seemed to exemplify technology writing in the mid-to-late 1990s but with not quite the messianic feel of peer George Gilder. Negroponte smartly hedges his bets for where the ‘rubber hits the road’ as society brings some odd effects in on technology usage.

Online media

Negroponte grasped the importance of digital and the internet as a medium for the provision of media content. That sounds like a no brainer but back in the day the record industry didn’t get it. In fact record industry went on to make blockbuster profits for another five years, N’Sync was the best selling artist of the year in 2000 with No Strings Attached selling 9.94 million copies. Over the next decade or so profits halved in the face of determined record label countermeasures including suing their customers.

OTT and cord cutting

Negroponte was dismissive of high definition video and television considering it wasteful of bandwidth. On this I get the sense that he is both right and wrong. We are surrounded by high definition screens (even 4K mobile screens – where their size doesn’t allow you to appreciate the full clarity of the image). But this doesn’t mean that our entertainment has to come in high definition, much YouTube isn’t watched on full screen for instance.

Disruption of publishing

Negroponte grasped that it would also shake up the book industry and Being Digital has been published in a number of e-book reader formats, but at the moment the experience of digital books leaves something to be desired compared to traditional books.

Tablets

Negroponte labours a surprising amount of copy on tablet devices. At the time that he published his book GO was in competition with Microsoft with pen computing devices and software, EO had launched their personal communicator – a phablet sized cellular network connected pen tablet and the first Apple Newton had launched in 1993. Negroponte goes on to insist that the finger is the best stylus. MIT Media Lab had done research on the stylus-less touch experience, but reading the article reminded me of the points Steve Jobs had made about touch on the original iPhone and iPad. It is also mirrored in the Ron Arad concepts I mentioned in an earlier blog post.

Agents

Negroponte considered that we would be supported in our online lives with agents that would provide contextual content and do tasks, which is where Google Now, Siri and Cortana have tried to go. However his writing implies an agent that is less ‘visible’ and in the face of the user.

Negroponte’s critique of virtual reality at the time provides good insight as to how much progress Oculus Rift and other similar products have made. He points out the technical and user experience challenges really well. If anyone is thinking about immersive experiences, it is well worth a read.

Going back and reading the book provided me an opportunity reflect on where we have come to in the past twenty years and Negroponte’s instincts where mostly right.

More information

Nicholas Negroponte – biography | MIT Media Lab

October 3, 2015
Cultural Strategy
I was recommended Cultural Strategy by a client to ‘better help understand their business’. The book is an accessible easy read as business books go. Cultural Strategy is written as a mix of theory and illustrative case studies. In the book, it’s authors Holt and Cameron propose that culture can be a key defining factor in business success:
- An organisation culture can make it more resilient or innovative providing a clearly differentiated experience between a brand and its competitors in the eyes of consumers. Their concept of cultural orthodoxy is similar to the red ocean strategy, where companies in mature sectors tend to look alike.
- By understanding consumers and the cultural context of the product or service, a market opportunity can be found. This is essentially what a good planner does in an advertising agency, but the Doug’s look to bake this into the organisation rather than having it as a wrapper at the end of the product process
This meshes in quite neatly with work by marketers like Byron Sharp, Les Binet and Peter Fields that show a distinctive differentiated brand is key to success. It would make sense for the company culture to be part of the brand. An example of this would be someone like Patagonia. But it could also be applied to the B2B space. Salesforce would be a good exemplar.

Where is might fall down is when you have a ‘house of brands’ company; like usually happen in the FMCG sector. And this is why there has been so much focus on brand purpose.

After reading the book, I am still no wiser about my client was trying to say about their business; but that was more about them than my reading material. This story however emphasises an important point, what may be perceived as a cultural innovation internally in a company may not manifest itself as brand innovation or even a differentiated position. More related book reviews here.

More information

Cultural Strategy by Holt and Cameron
Cultural Strategy Group
September 17, 2015
Ghost in the Shell

Masamune Shirow’s Ghost In The Shell is a three-volume manga series (volumes 1, 1.5 and 2) that is based on a Japanese security service team who try and solve cyber-crime related issues.

The stories deal with a future where technology is embedded into human beings and augment them. It is also based around a world where the internet of things is an everyday occurrence. Shirow’s future is believable. Unlike Star Trek, he recognised that the future is built in layers on the past. So you see this in the architecture in the background of picture cells.

You also see that layers in terms of everything from clothing and personal effects to vehicles of the protagonists.

The author obvioiusly goes deeply into the story as a thought experiment with copious side notes explaining either technological developments or why he has made certain decisions. The stuff that he incorporated was cutting edge scientific research at the time. Whilst I love the anime adaptions, this insight into Shirow’s thinking makes the books invaluable.

The books seem to have been remarkably prescient about hacking and the risks of technology. In previous literature, hackers were generally on the side of good or libertarians. In Ghost In The Shell you have cyber warfare and cyber crime similar to our own reality today. A crumbling healthcare system, organised crime, private military entities and shadowy state actors.

Unfortunately, the designers of smart televisions and refrigerators didn’t pay much attention to these books, otherwise they would not have left these products so open to being hacked. Come for the sci-fi stay the course of the books for the underlying ideas. More book reviews here.

September 4, 2014
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

The Idea Factory reaches back to an age that is now alien to most of us. At one time the most complex devices that people generally had in their homes were a sewing machine, a piano or a mechanical clock or watch. Yet we now view clothes (particularly those from H&M and Primark) as disposable objects, have a limitless amount of media entertainment available at our finger tips and the complexity of a smartphone in your pocket eclipses the complexity of any device in a home just a few decades previously.

Gertner tracks the rise of the American telephone company AT&T through its research arm Bell Labs. Reading the book, the first thing that strikes you is the immense complexity of the very young telephone networks with its complex mechanical switches, manually operated patch boards and strands of copper telephone lines stringing the country together in a way far more immediate than railway travel.

Out of Bell Labs came a flurry of developments over just a few decades: the vacuum tube

the transistor

the laser

fibre optic networks

the CCD (charged couple device) which is the eye of video and digital cameras

and the cellular networks we now take for granted

What the book fails to answer is the very nature of innovation that Bell Labs was held up for. Is there an ideal structure for innovation? It seems to be the case that ‘it depends’ is the answer; the innovations seemed to come from brilliant individuals, small teams and herculean efforts.

Robert X. Cringely in his book Accidental Empires talked about Silicon Valley really revolving around the efforts and successes of some four dozen people being at the right place and the right time. Gertner’s book implies a similar linkage bringing in a number of names familiar with technology history: Claude Shannon, William Shockley and Charles Kao.

AT&T launched Telstar based on a range of technologies that had been developed over the previous decades at Bell Labs, from solar cells to vacuum tube-based amplifiers. The company had a tight relationship with the Department of Defence due to the amount of work it had done in the early cold war on radar and guidance systems. The satellite was launched aloft on a first generation Delta rocket, US military payloads now travel into space on a fourth generation Delta rocket.

It was also apparent that innovation seems to have its natural time like the Technium of Kevin Kelly’s book What Technology Wants; indeed the history of the Bell Company had much to do with Alexander Bell’s dash to patent an invention that had also been conceived at the same time by another gentleman called Gray.

There is an interesting case study in product development failure with a look at AT&T’s abortive picture phone service from the early 1960s.

In comparison to Bell Labs early history the book moves at break-neck speed through the history of the labs after the break up of AT&T in 1984. A few things that sprung out of this:

Lucent’s rise and decline due to vendor financing of telecoms equipment sales. It is interesting that Huawei arranges for Chinese state banks to put up the financing rather than putting up the money itself; but essentially sells on the same premise that made Lucent successful.

The nature of innovation had fundamentally changed, there was now a core body of work that corporate innovation could draw on without doing the kind of unfettered research that Bell Labs had carried out and facilitated great leaps forward.

If you are at all curious about the why of your smartphone, broadband connection or the underpinnings of the software running your MacBook then The Idea Factory is a recommended read. My one criticism is that the post-break up Bell Labs deserves far more exploration than The Idea Factory gives it. You can find more book reviews here.

July 8, 2014
What Chinese Want by Tom Doctoroff

What Chinese Want author Doctoroff is advertising agency J Walter Thompson (JWT)’s man in China. He has been there since the mid-1990s and so has had the time and access to agency resources to try and make sense of Chinese society, culture and how it pertains to consumer behaviour.

Doctoroff provides a good introduction to Chinese the impact of communism on culture and consumer behaviour. As a marketer who has worked in China, the book’s content largely rang true to me. By focusing on culture, Doctoroff doesn’t fall into some of the pitfalls of a society under constant change. Technology may change interactions but

I found some of the campaigns Doctoroff references really interesting. He illustrates each of the points that he makes with case studies and isn’t shy of pointing out where mistakes were made and how approaches were tweaked. This critical honesty from an advertising agency is refreshing. Advertising agencies are used to providing shiny successful case studies to win new clients or industry award entries.

I read some of the reviews on Amazon and thought them a bit harsh. The reviewers don’t seem to have on the ground experience in China. Having been in the trenches, I would recommend What Chinese Want as a good informative read. More China related content here.

September 1, 2012