Month: May 2009

  • Cultural energy crisis?

    Mark Fisher argued that there was an effective cultural energy crisis in his article Running on empty published in the New Statesman online. His premise was that culture lacked the energy it had in previous decades. That the noughties are encompassed by a sense of cultural deceleration. He argues that cultural changes were driven by technology and that these technologies gave cultures their indelible mark: what he calls a ‘technological rapture’ that is absent from present culture.

    The present moment might in fact be best characterised by a discrepancy between the onward march of technology and the stalling, stagnation and retardation of culture.

    He characterises the web in its ‘web 2.0’ incarnation as regurgitating older media forms and having a parasitic relationship on ‘old media’ forms and that web 2.0 encourages us to ‘behave like spectators’. That web 2.0 deprives cultural movements of a ‘laboratory’ to evolve before hitting the mainstream and the networked world provides us with a broadly homogenised culture. Fisher summarises that ‘that technology will not deliver new forms of culture all on its own’.

    I think that Fisher’s rhetoric is first-rate, many of the assertions can be disproved (if we had a homogeneous culture, then why is Clear Channel’s radio business going through a long and lingering death spiral)?

    I find his point about technology not delivering new forms of culture all on its own most interesting though as I don’t believe that it ever did deliver new forms of culture. It helped them certainly, but it is only one ingredient in cultural change.

    The 1960s and the 1970s were as much about a new individual consumerism and a disillusionment with government as much as technological leap forwards. The acid house and rave movement, whilst influenced by cheap computing, digital samplers, MDMA manufacture and cheaper analogue synthesisers it was also influenced by the depressing soulless nature of the 1980s.

    Secondly, I’d argue that technological innnovation is ‘lumpy’ at the moment there isn’t one ‘world changing’ paradigm shift recently. Recent ones would have been the ‘web, affordable jet travel, the contraceptive pill, colour television, desktop page layout software and the ubiquitous mobile phone.

    Many of the energetic sub-cultures that Fisher describes had a similar parasitic nature on old media and cultures that he attributes to web 2.0. Jungle would have been nowhere without the Amen Break from the b-side to Color Him Father by The Winstons released back in 1969. Acid house pioneers saw a clear lineage between themselves and electronic music pioneers like Kraftwerk. House and garage were as much about recreating in electronic means the sounds of the Salsoul record label as they were about blazing a new trail. And I haven’t even mentioned Andy Warhol or the way rock music raped and plundered rhythm and blues.

    Finally maybe cultural progress or energy has moved from being a linear track of occurrences: hippies -> progressive rock -> glam rock -> punk and disco -> new romantics -> rave to a massively parallel cultural shift as we can access and tune into Japanese music, Korean films and read about Finnish design in a moment-by-moment way that wouldn’t have been possible before? More on culture here.

  • Pen pals

    When I was a kid, I, along with with the rest of my primary school class had pen pals. We learned about life in the US from students at an elementary school in Palo Alto. I learned what root beer, a peanut butter and a grape jelly sandwich and granola tasted like. I found out how exciting it was to play Pong and how much of a drag it was to go on a road trip to the Yellowstone national park. I was shocked to hear that girls played football and found out what it was like to go to an American football match. We fell out of touch when my pen pal went to summer camp one year, tweens are fickle that way.

    My Mam has used cards and occasional letters to keep in touch with former work colleagues who she worked alongside 45 years ago in a manual telephone exchange as a operator in a small Irish market town. (In those days, you didn’t dial a number directly like you did today, an operator made the connection for you operating a series of peg boards and was also involved in parts of the billing through a docketing system. Now you can dial pretty much any number around the world from a cell phone in your pocket or the Skype software on your home computer).  Despite that they are now in North America and Ireland, the pen pals keep each other abreast of major life developments and kept alive the ties that bound them together as work colleagues sharing a shift roster all them years before.

    Now being a pen pal is a more adult affair. Fear of peadophiles, multi-channel television stations and the immediate commications environment of the internet has reduced pretty much all the factors that made writing to pen pals an attractive activity for kids.  If you were ten today, why communicate by letter when reality television allows you to see inside other people’s lives with your own eyes, you don’t need to wait a week or more for a letter you could chat to new-found friends on Club Penguin?

    I went through the Wikipedia article on pen pals to see if I could find useful information to colour this posting with. I found out about the phenomena of prison pen pals. In the US (and most other countries) penal systems, convicts don’t have access to internet communications, so the mail system, limited phone calls and visits are their only way of communicating with their contacts. Combine that with bad boy (or girl) charm and you can understand why prison pen pals has a niche appeal (the site design is effective if dated with mid 90s GIF clip art and MIDI melodies that go with profiles: most of them seem to be fans of the musical Annie and have ‘Its a hard knock life’ as their profile music).

    What does the demise of the pen pal mean that we will have a change in the kind of networks and the nature of networks that we have in the future in comparison to previous generations? I think that whilst we may have hundreds of social network friends, these networks are likely to be ‘looser’ than pen pal contacts, an exchange of letters has got to be a different interaction to wall postings and Facebook status messages.

  • Mystery Ranch 3-day assault pack

    I found Mystery Ranch when researching options. I have been thinking about getting a carry-on luggage compliant back pack to carry a laptop, camera, adaptors and other bits-and-bobs that comes in handy during flying. To get an idea of what I carry, here is a picture of my go bag and what I took to Hong Kong a couple of years ago.

    Hong Kong Go Bag - Timbuk2

    I wanted to have a rucksack. Most of the obvious options like The North Face and Oakley weren’t really what I was looking for. I want a good back on the rucksack that will help me deal with long queues in immigration and easy organisation for my stuff.

    So I started to look at more military orientated designs. Most alpine bags sacrifice durability for going high speed, which is why I looked at after-market tactical suppliers instead. Mystery Ranch was a name that kept coming up again and again.

    Mystery Ranch design and make these back in Bozeman, Montana with the kind of craftmanship that you would expect from people like Rickshaw Bagworks or Timbuk2. Its an area that is popular with outdoor enthusiasts and alpine sports enthusiasts. Their designer Dana Gleason has over 20 years experience repairing other people’s equipment, so you’d expect that he learned a bit about what works and what didn’t. He set up and sold a couple of outdoor brands before, parting company when the product wouldn’t live up to the quality that he wanted and was going to made half way around the world in a factory that couldn’t be adequately supervised.

    The Mystery Ranch three day assault pack comes with two killer features. The Y-zip design allows you easily access all the back pack contents rather than rooting around in desperation. The unique adjustable yoke that allows you to get the fit of the bag just right.

    These bags don’t come cheap, but are much more made-to-measure than comparable luggage. You can find out more here. More related content can be found here.

  • Schedule info + other news

    Schedule info

    Dare to dream: American and Delta want to charge money for access to their schedule info | Upgrade: Travel Better – schedule info is critical for planning and purchasing air travel. Charging for air travel schedule info is like any other brand charging for consideration to purchase. I can’t even articulate how crazy it is for American and Delta to charge for access to their schedule info

    Business

    Ouch. Microsoft Profits Drop 32 Percent In March Quarter

    Economy Be Damned: Apple Posts Its Best Second Quarter Earnings Ever – the conventional PC is being sidelined

    Consumer behaviour

    42 Million U.S. Women Use Social Media: Blogs Most Influential | Small Business Trends

    Customers sometimes do not know what they want

    Cellphones in India – A Pocket-Size Leveler in an Outsize Land – NYTimes.com

    China Youthology Paper to Download: China Youth Trends and Business Implications | China Youth Watch by China Youthology 青年志

    Consumers Blame Mad Men for Recession – BusinessWeek

    Design

    IntelliSearch – interesting user experience idea for search bar

    Jonathan Ive and Marc Newson Gripe About Design’s Current State | Design & Innovation | Fast Company

    Finance

    WSJ Hatching New Micro-payment Plan (NWS)

    Gadget

    Nokia: 5800 has 20% of global touchscreen phone market

    Netbook Boom Causes Microsoft’s Revenues to Stutter | Technomix | Fast Company

    How to

    BillTweets (billtweets) on Twitter – handy for PA people, helping track bills in parliament. An OpenHackDay London award winner

    Action Method Online :: Home – capitalising on the GTD popularity over the past few years comes Action Method: but the opportunity to go enterprise

    Welcome to Aviary – PhotoShop in a browser: sort of

    Guide to Wikipedia Tools & Resources – Everything You Wanted to Do With Wikipedia Encyclopedia

    Gemma Cartwright » Blog Archive » How to do a blogger event

    64 Things Every Geek Should Know – LaptopLogic.com

    Ideas

    The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and JESS3 – microsite around the iconic diagram

    Innovation

    Should Design Be Held Back by a Tyranny of Data? – NYTimes.com – Can a company blunt its innovation edge if it listens to its customers too closely? Can its products become dull if they are tailored to match exactly what users say they want?

    Japan

    What’s happening in Japan right now?: Business Models of Social Media in Japan

    CR Blog » Blog Archive » CRTV: Japan’s New Mohemians – more related content here.

    Salarymen go extinct as economic climate changes – Times Online

    Marketing

    Digital technology undermines reputations, study says – PRWeek UK

    Lois Whitman Now An Unwilling Case Study In How Not To Do PR

    Earned Followers Are Better Than Junk Circulation – John Battelle’s Searchblog – kind of like Tom really isn’t your friend on Facebook

    Racy Facebook Pics Force Candidate Out Of Running | WebProNews – be careful what you do out there

    Media

    New Cartographer – Future Trends in Mobile and Attention Data

    Which Social Network is the Most Generous?

    Yelp gives businesses a voice | Econsultancy

    Social media engagement: are we making it up as we go along? | Blog | Econsultancy

    Nielsen Data Offers Real Reason ISPs Are Metering – telcos want in on the content game

    Software

    EC wants software makers held liable for code – ZDNet.co.uk – what counts as software anymore?

    PSD to WordPress Theme Coding – in their own words ‘Your design to a beautiful WordPress Theme’

    AppleInsider | Snow Leopard Server to offer low cost, secure mobile access to iPhone

    Wireless

    Find the Right Wireless Broadband for You

  • GeoCities

    When people ask me about social media: teach them how to do <insert an activity> on <insert the name of a service de jour> and I say sure I can teach you that (for a fee). Much of the value comes from being curious, this is as much about the way think and look at things as anything else. The second is trying to learn from history, which is why I was curious about the likes of Geocities. You can pick up skills as you go along, once you know what you want to do.

    Historic interest and Geocities

    However, services come and go, but the conversation remains. A classic case-in-point is GeoCities. Yahoo! has non-announced that it is shuttering this pioneering social network at the end of the year. GeoCities was founded in the mid-1990s and grew rapidly (ok so this was the dial-up era and the page building tools on it were the then equivalent of cutting edge-bandwidth hogging web 2.0 tools).

    The site was organised into neighbourhoods of common interest: Silicon Valley for technology for example where ‘birds of a feather’ could ‘flock together’. The page creation tools were broadly comparable to MySpace profiles: people foisted poor aesthetics, bad web design and golden labrador digital photographs on an early online audience.

    From a standing start in the middle of 1995, two years later they were the fifth most trafficked property on the web and a million-plus registered users (or Homesteaders as GeoCities called these web pioneers).

    In college, I found lots of great content on GeoCities and cited some of the homesteaders pages as references in my essays and degree course work.

    Yahoo! acquired the company for 2.87 billion USD in early 1999, this was cited as his ‘first rocket ship ride‘ by veteran VC Fred Wilson. There are obvious parallels to Facebook in this meteoric growth.

    When I worked at Yahoo!, the disastrous terms of service debacle at GeoCities post-acquisition change in the terms of service where ‘the company owned all rights and content, including media such as pictures’ were held up as a lesson that we should learn from. Whilst Yahoo! quickly reversed this decision there was an exodus of homesteaders. It was an expensive mistake that we were loath to repeat when working with newer services like flickr. Again this sounds like some of the debacles that Facebook has faced. Indeed Facebook’s current terms of service includes rights on the user content that is far greater than in the current Yahoo! terms of service, here is the relevant section from Facebook’s Terms of Use:

    … an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

    GeoCities like Facebook with its Beacon service had a scandal on its hands over user privacy. The FTC found that GeoCities had engaged in deceptive acts and practices in contravention in their privacy act. Subsequently, a consent order was entered into which prohibited GeoCities from misrepresenting the purpose for which it collects and/or uses personal identifying information from consumers.

    Time moved on and GeoCities became a key part spam email acting as a redirect page for online pharmacies and replica watch sellers alongside more conventional GeoCities user pages. Over the past years the site traffic for GeoCities dropped faster than shareholder value at Yahoo!. The lesson here is that the Twitter or Facebook or today, can be the GeoCities of tomorrow. In fact, only five of the top 15 web service of a decade ago still have a similar kind of profile today.

    If we look beyond web services to world history we can all think about eras and empires that have past, yet thinking (from the likes of Niccolò Machiavelli, Sun Tzu | 孙子, Miyamoto Musashi | 宮本 武蔵 and Carl Von Clausewitz) is as relevant today as it was when they created it centuries or millenia ago. In the grand scheme of things being open and understanding the concepts of conversation are more important than the latest tools. Whilst I still get excited about the ‘new Twitter’, I still like to keep things in perspective. I have cross-posted this at my employer’s blog. More content on ideas can be fund here.