Ged Carroll

Category: culture | 文明 | 미디어와 예술 | 人文

Culture was the central point of my reason to start this blog. I thought that there was so much to explore in Asian culture to try and understand the future.

Initially my interest was focused very much on Japan and Hong Kong. It’s ironic that before the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative there was much more content out there about what was happening in Japan. Great and really missed publications like the Japan Trends blog and Ping magazine.

Hong Kong’s film industry had past its peak in the mid 1990s, but was still doing interesting stuff and the city was a great place to synthesise both eastern and western ideas to make them its own. Hong Kong because its so densely populated has served as a laboratory of sorts for the mobile industry.

Way before there was Uber Eats or Food Panda, Hong Kongers would send their order over WhatsApp before going over to pay for and pick up their food. Even my local McDonalds used to have a WhatsApp number that they gave out to regular customers. All of this worked because Hong Kong was a higher trust society than the UK or China. In many respects in terms of trust, its more like Japan.

Korea quickly became a country of interest as I caught the ‘Korean wave’ or hallyu on its way up. I also have discussed Chinese culture and how it has synthesised other cultures.

More recently, aspect of Chinese culture that I have covered has taken a darker turn due to a number of factors.

  • Media diary of a gen X man

    Stephen Waddington’s daughter Ellie posted a media diary with a guest post on his blog, go and have a read of it. This snowballed into what is likely to be a series of media diary posts by different people. My contribution was published on his blog this morning. I penned the original version of my media diary as a stream of consciousness whilst laid up. I’ve tried to clear up any typing and comment on the reactions to date here which I have bundled together as the directors cut.

    The directors cut

    So why the media diary directors cut? I have cleaned up a few typos and expanded on a few bits for clarity, hence the directors cut comment.

    I wouldn’t say my media diary is that of a typical consumer, I have lived inside the technology-media industrial complex since the late 1990s and worked in the scientific side of the UK’s now largely defunct industry prior to that. I am steeped in counter-culture since the mid-1980s and spent a fair bit of time in Hong Kong – which changed my outlook somewhat. I am also unencumbered by family life at the moment.

    Reactions

    The reaction so far to the posting has been interesting:

    • Stephen described me in his intro to my post as having ‘iconoclastic tendencies’. I guess so, though this is coming less from wanting to tear systems down, than finding tools that work for me. This is done in the ethos behind Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools and the earlier Whole Earth Catalog. Despite being a long time Apple user, I don’t have all my data in the Apple ecosystem and I felt a similar way about the likes of Google and Facebook. I also like the idea of services that do one thing well. And like to support services like Newsblur or Pinboard that are made by one person or a small team. I guess this explanation of my framework allows the directors cut view to provide a little more context. And I guess iconoclastic works as shorthand in the meantime, Stephen has known me on and off for over 20 years.
    • I was amused at being called a mature hipster, although in this day and age it might be a way of saying metropolitan elite. This I guess would be accurate. The sunny side of this viewpoint would be that it goes to prove that geeks are the new cool. I always thought of myself closer to the comic store owner in The Simpsons. I have never considered myself an elite; which I hope comes across in the directors cut.
    • The last part of the article was called out by a few people who got in touch, my comments on privacy seemed to touch a nerve in a way that my concerns about innovation didn’t. The UK economy is not going to get saved from going into decline like Greece during the last financial crisis with just a few blockchain start-ups

    Messenger for keeping in touch and on track

    Over a decade ago I used to use Adium X, a multi-service instant messaging client for the Mac to keep in touch with a wide range of friends, colleagues, suppliers and clients. Each client was like hitting a different layer of clay in an archeological dig, indicating when I knew them.

    People on ICQ where the longest held contacts, then Yahoo! Messenger (I even ended up working at Yahoo!), Windows Live messenger was purely about my time at Waggener Edstrom and GoogleTalk became de-rigeur when the bots on Yahoo! Messenger came too much.

    Now I use WeChat, LINE, Signal, Skype and Telegram. Like IM platforms before it each messenger platform fits a segment of friends, colleagues and clients.

    Flickr is an archive

    I have friends that are talented photographers and you can’t convince me that some nice filters and a square picture adds up to the pretentions of photographic art that many people seem to feel it has. I have been on Flickr for 11 years and 18,345 photographs later, it would have to be a really compelling service that would get me to move. Flickr is my stock image library,it is my visual diary, image hosting for my blog and my mood board for when I am looking for inspiration at work.

    I think it has a better community than Instagram because it isn’t ubiquitous, it still has that early web 2.0 smell to it, though my heart is in my mouth every time Yahoo!’s finances take a wobble.

    Facebook is utilitarian

    I use Facebook in a similar way to developer friends using Stack Overflow or other forums for professional social discourse on a couple of private groups. I don’t even bother with cognitive dissonance type of posts of it always being sunny on Facebook. I know it’s crap; in your heart-of-hearts you probably know it too. Facebook events are often used, alongside meetup.com and Eventbrite. For loose network contacts, Facebook acts like a poorly designed phone book.

    Twitter: I have a bot for that

    Twitter is used as a messaging service for some of my friends, but mostly I use it to passively consume content like breaking news in lists and syndicate content that I find interesting. I do this syndication through various ‘recipes’ set up in IFTTT.

    Media content

    Steve Jobs talked about the only way to fight music piracy was to have a better idea. So for a number of years I have bought my music on iTunes, Bleep and Beatport alongside my love of vinyl records. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the record labels as they have consistently focused on short term blockbuster hits at the expense of slow and steady selling artists – which is especially retarded when you think about the long tail model of media consumption. They need to evolve their business model to become cheaper and more efficient in their A&R processes in order to do this. I have recently started ripping CDs into my music library again as an arbitrage play (these are often cheaper than digital downloads) or offer back catalogue content that digital services don’t.

    I use a late model iPod Classic because of its 160GB storage. For streaming music I listen to mixes, mash ups, edits and remixes on Soundcloud and deephousepage.com. My current favourite remixer is Luxxury. I use the online radio channels (not Beats 1) in iTunes to have as relaxing background music prior to turning in at home.

    I watch live news on television as the broadcast network is better for supporting big audience numbers in comparison to the infrastructure of the internet. We have more bandwidth at the edges, but still the same bottlenecks I experienced some ten years previously during the July 7 bombings in London.

    I have an Apple TV box that I use for Netflix, internet radio and iTunes store content. Out of the terrestrial channels I tend to only use iPlayer as it is so much better designed than 4oD, ITV Player or Channel 5’s offering. I stream RTE News, Bloomberg TV and the BBC World Service. My favourite news content comes from Vice – it feels like the channel that CNN should have been and is less shaped to meet the norms of the establishment, though this will undoubtedly change in the near future.

    News is apps and RSS.

    My RSS reader of choice is Newsblur.com. I was a minority amongst my peers in that I never trusted my bookmarks and OPML data to Google’s Reader, instead using Bloglines and then Fastladder.com. Both of which where driven out of business by Google prior to them closing Reader.

    Instead bookmarking is done with pinboard.in. I also get news from the RTE News app, a breaking news list I built in Twitter, stratfor.com, vice.com and the South China Morning Post mobile app. If you’d asked me this ten years ago then The Economist would have been on here, but its been replaced by vice.com and Monocle magazine.

    When I get to read a newspaper; it is the FT and the Wall Street Journal on the way home from work as a way to decompress, or the weekend FT for a mellow Saturday morning. I still read the US edition of Wired magazine in a print copy as the accompanying digital subscription has somehow become borked on my iPad. My media indulgence would be occasionally rifling through the pages of Japanese style magazine Free & Easy.

    I subscribe to a number of email newsletters for specialist analysis.

    Brands that cut through

    The brands that cut through for me are ones that cut their own path. I don’t wake up in the morning and think:

    hell yeah I want to engage with a brand on a social channel

    With people like Carhartt, Gregory Mountain Products, Canon, Nikon, Mystery Ranch, Barebones Software, Apple, S-Double Studios, Porter Tokyo and IWC Schaffhausen the product is the marketing – the online marketing efforts of these brands are coincidental. I do know that many of these brands do spend a good deal of effort to influence the kind of publications that I read. Monocle magazine does a really good job of integrating marketing and content.

    I buy much more online now, the high street has become quite bland, especially after having lived in Asia. I use trans shipment company buyee.jp to buy items in Japan and lightinthebox.com has replaced many of the none-impulse purchases that I would have made at Argos.

    Challenge for brands, media and life itself

    The internet has come to mirror the wonders, banalities and horror of everyday life. As I write this Ellen Pao had resigned as CEO at Reddit. Reddit is a poster child for all of these categories from organising gifts for the poor to water cooler chatter, racism and death threats against Ms Pao.

    Culture has now been made massively parallel by the internet. As an 18 year old, I remember having to get a train down to London to go trawling through specialist shops from Camden to Soho  looking for Stussy clothing and records on the Japanese Major Force label. Now everything is up on YouTube or Soundcloud for you to enjoy.

    Making a difference is a work in progress

    Like Ellie, I am not that optimistic about aspects of the world. In many respects the concerns of gen-y&z mirrored concerns of a young gen-x. I held McJobs and had a constant fear of unemployment over my head, was concerned about nuclear holocaust, economic meltdown and an environmental dystopian future – concerns that I still have today. There is an anti-science bias and a lack of hard innovation coming through that will fuel the next forty years of innovation. The current outlook reminds me a bit of the film Interstellar where the lack of willingness to focus on anything but on our own small plot was killing humans as a species. The current political climate with regards to privacy and digital services indicates a luddite and megalomaniac political tinge, where freedom is being sacrificed for the illusion of safety from extremism. The only thing that actually offers that freedom is a better idea, not an Orwellesque vision of privacy.

    About Ged Carroll

    Ged currently works heading up digital services at Racepoint Global in London. He lives in the East End and spends a lot of time in Hong Kong. You’ll find him online at renaissance chambara.

    So that’s the directors cut of this not so secret internet diary.

    More information

    WeChat
    LINE
    Signal
    Telegram
    Flickr
    Pinboard
    Newsblur
    Bleep
    Beatport
    Luxxury on Soundcloud
    deephousepage
    RTE News Now
    South China Morning Post
    Monocle
    Buyee
    lightinthebox

  • HSBC PMI + more things

    HSBC PMI

    HSBC will no longer provide one of the best gauges of China’s economy – Quartz – but hopefully someone else will step up to do the sponsorship instead. The HSBC PMI measure was the most reliable economic measure coming out of China that was wasn’t skewed by state-owned enterprises (SOEs). SOEs get easy state bank loans where as the private SMEs that the HSBC PMI looks at don’t have that advantage and so provide a ‘truer’ picture of what is actually going on. Does this mean a longer term difficult position for HSBC as well as transparent economic data like the HSBC PMI?

    China

    Born Red – The New Yorker – interesting profile of Xi Jinping

    Culture

    Check out MelodySheep’s album on Bandcamp. More culture related content here.

    483 lines by Seoul-based Kimchi and Chips is a welcome break from 3d projection mapping for interesting visualisations. It reminds me of the work Troika turn out

    Economics

    A generation from now, most of the world’s GDP will come from Asia | Quartz – get ready for the new order of things

    FMCG

    I was doing some research and came across the collaboration between MelodySheep and General Mills to remix Lucky Charms adverts. His interpretation shows a darker side to the kids hunting for Lucky Charms

    Innovation

    SoftBank Robot Pepper Sells Out in a Minute – Japan Real Time – WSJ – via Aldebaran Robotics (paywall) – much of this is about Japanese culture’s positive reception to robots as it is to the quality of Pepper itself. There are other robots that can fill a similar kind of customer service role. Its really worth reading about how Japanese consumers interacted with their Sony Aibo

    Japan

    This wonderful film of Tokyo by Brandon Li which somehow feels as if it should be a Guinness advert, partly due to the narration by Tom O’Bedlam

    It is interesting how the Guinness brand has came to own strong storytelling in advertising.

    Media

    Cannes: Google’s agency-sales head wants to push creativity – Campaign Asia – ZOO – Google’s creative agency butts up against agencies to get creative briefs (paywall)

    Online

    2015/16 Fixture List Released | Barclays Premier League – interesting that the FA are recommending match-by-match hashtags to build conversations on Twitter

    I have been using Ben Haller‘s Fracture fractal screensaver for almost as long as I have used Mac OS X (back when it was called Puma). Michael Clark has a site for images used creating Fracture called Fractal of the Day with achingly beautiful tripped out abstract images. The Mac has traditionally been a home to lots of passionate small software development companies who code thoughtful apps. These apps then build a passionate user community around them.  
    mandelbroitset

    Security

    GCHQ spies discredit targets on the internet – Business Insider – about what I would expect them to be doing. More security related posts here.

    Technology

    I, Cringely The U.S. computer industry is dying and I’ll tell you exactly who is killing it and why – I, Cringely – cloud computing is economics not innovation

  • Space dogyssey & more things

    Space Dogyssey

    Space Dogyssey – beautiful college student animated film. Space Dogyssey is interesting mixed media. A mix of stop animation  and cel animation 

    Roger Linn

    Great panel discussion with three great designers of electronic music instruments: Roger Linn (LinnDrum, Linn 9000, Akai MPC originator), Dave Smith (Prophet 5, MIDI inventor) and Tom Oberheim (Oberheim Voice synthesisers). The LinnDrum

    The Latin Rascals

    Great early mix from The Latin Rascals who were influential remixers, influential producers of freestyle tracks and makers of epic tape edits back in the mid-1980s. The Latin Rascals did amazing remix work, even for the likes of Bruce Springsteen, the Force MDs, the Pet Shop Boys and Duran Duran. They influenced and eventually worked with Arthur Baker and Civilles and Cole. One of the Rascals Tony Moran still produces and DJs.


    Canadian Caper

    Amazing psychadelic artwork drawn by Jack Kirby, that was used to sell in Argo to the Iranians and everyone else for that manner. Argo was a science fiction film project that the CIA used as a cover in order to get diplomatic staff out of Iran during the revolution. Kirby’s drawings were supposed to be concept art and the escapees were pretending to be location scouts. This operation went to be known as the Canadian Caper. It was adapted into a film featuring Ben Affleck called Argo. The original space opera envisioned by Jack Kirby never got beyond the artwork that I have linked to. You can read more about the Canadian Caper as the operation has since been called here.

    Syd Mead inspired animation

    Amazing Mobius / Syd Mead inspired animated video. More design related content. The vivid world that the animator creates is nothing short of stunning. The use of flat colour gives a kind of ‘anti-anime’ feel to the video. Instead it feels like I am looking at a Mobius graphic novel and hallucinating the movement on the page.

  • Brand storytelling: a bitter pill to swallow?

    I have been thinking about brand storytelling after watching Adam Curtis’ Bitter Lake over the weekend which is ostensibly trying to tell the story of Afghanistan from then end of the second world war to today. But it is also a parable on how the simplicity of storytelling used by the political classes to get the populace on side in the west has been ultimately counterproductive. This counterproductive nature of it, made me think about brand storytelling, that is often simple to aid both delivery and effectiveness.

    I have worked for businesses since the mid-noughties that put brand storytelling at the centre of offerings – often using simple mono-myths as models. In addition, my colleagues at one agency took this a stage further and sold their services as building on the ‘best practice’ of winning political campaigns – if you like Ogilvy on Advertising but written by Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and George W Bush.

    The truth is that our relationships with brand is often more complex and shifting than we has marketers let on. Brands have symbolic and status power which changes over time. The question that Bitter Lake seeded in my mind, is brand storytelling actually going to breed a future set of consumers with little to know brand engagement? Where brand values become a mill stone rather than a touch stone? It’s too early to tell and I don’t know the answers if it did happen, though my gut says going to an approach of radical honesty. More branding related content here.

    More information
    Bitter Lake | Wikipedia

  • Yakuza Apocalypse + more

    Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War Of The Underworld

    Awesome trailer for Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War Of The Underworld from Takashi Miike

    Yakuza Apocalypse is a visceral shock to the system. It strips away the glamour that surrounds the yakuza in Japanese culture, a bit like like the way the Krays are glamourised in British culture. The reality is rather more squalid, like Tadamasa Goto who is known to have provided information to the FBI. While they didn’t get anything, a grass is still a grass.

    Optical data communications technology

    Really interesting Panasonic technology for data transfer, is it more than a less obvious QRcode in terms of the data that it contains?

    Stüssy x Sophnet

    Stüssy have done a really good collaboration with Japanese brand Sophnet which dropped this week. I managed to pick up a Stüssy x Sophnet t-shirt and hooded top. I was surprised by two things. The quality was more up to the old school Stüssy standard than is usually the case now. Secondly, for a Japanese brand collaboration, they both came in western XXL size. We won’t see the like of this collaboration for a good while again, if ever.

    More luxury related content here.
    stussy

    SoftBank changes tack with adverts

    SoftBank seem to have moved away from their kooky ‘family’ adverts using modern samurai Isao Machii cuts many objects with ”Iaido” sword strokes