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.

  • Crypto by Steven Levy

    Reading Crypto followed after I had read Steven Levy’s previous works Hackers, Insanely Great and Artificial Life earlier on in my PR career. Along with Fire In The Valley and Accidental Empires, Levy’s books had provided a great insight into the technology industry and the cultural forces behind it.

    Crypto is more of the same as the counter-cultural belief systems that begat the Whole Earth Catalog and the Homebrew Computer Club. This viewpoint clashed head on with the security apparatus of the US government. Some of the descriptions around public cryptographic usage like PGP and MailSafe were analogous to what we now call the social graph in terms of issues of personal trust, privacy and differing types of relationships and interactions. The book also makes interesting reading because it takes you back to a time when technology moved forwards in leaps and bounds of public perception.

    Its hard now to feel the same excitement about the internet now that we’ve lived with it for the past decade and a half, when I moved into my present house I considered my broadband connection as important as getting the utilities sorted for my move. ADSL was as important as electricity for me. And with that ubiquity, the magic has disappeared.

    Levy communicates the principles of modern cryptography well and leads the reader through the myriad events that let to modern cryptography and why it is so important. (Hint: how do you think it is so hard for criminals not to buy things on your credit card once you’ve shopped at Amazon, YesAsia, the iTunes Music Store or Pizza Hut?). More book reviews here.

  • Keeping it gangster with Jingjing

    Hong Kong is familiar to many westerners as a backdrop for gangster films from Enter the Dragon to Jackie Chan’s Police Story, PTU and the Infernal Affairs trilogy.

    In fact, the society is much more organised and less violent than the likes of the UK. Even the old public housing projects in Aberdeen don’t really compare to south London. However, why let the truth get in the way of a good story or movie? Which is why the Beijing Olympics mascot Jingjing made me laugh.

    Olympic mascots - check out the gangster panda with the hand-gun

    You can see Jingjing giving it the full gangster style in shooting. Also note the red face of drunken rage. And he is also an accomplished fighter and tasty with a baseball bat. This has been featured across Beijing 2008 marketing materials and souvenirs.

    JingJing1.jpg

    On a more serious note the games event pictograms are an interesting organic interpretation of what Otl Aicher did for the 1972 Munich Olympics. You can see them in this surround at the Bank of China building (click on the picture if you want to see in more detail.) They remind me of early Chinese character pictograms in terms of their feel, a kind of future primitive design aesthetic. You can see how pride and nationalism are coming through in the designs.

    Bank of China

    More China related coverage here.

  • Bill and Dave by Michael Malone

    Bill and Dave were better known now by their surnames: Hewlett-Packard. It is familiar to consumers as a brand of printer, laptops and digital cameras sold in supermarkets up and down the country. Some may remember that they had a Watergate-type moment recently and a woman CEO who made a dogs dinner of things.

    I visited Boeblingen (near Stuttgart) – the European headquarters of Hewlett-Packard in the late 90s and left deeply unimpressed by a large but seemingly directionless technology behemoth. We were on the cusp of the internet, while they were talking about printing brochures on demand. While this was happening the best internet search engine at the time, Alta Vista, had been built by their long time rival Digital Equipment Corporation.

    Malone in his book Bill and Dave gave me a better appreciation of Hewlett-Packard. He brings into perspective how important Bill Hewlett and David Packard were to the technology sector and modern business practices.

    From a PR perspective, I found facinating the way Bill and David self-consciously built their own personal legends which helped support and extend the HP Way. The company’s culture was built, extended and modified in a deliberate, planned manner unparalleled in any other company. Their culture was what PR people would now call thought leadership – which feels very now given the start of interest around brand purpose.

    Bill and Dave wrote the book on corporate reputation without the help of big name agencies and invented the elements as they went along, combined with a wisdom worthy of Solomon. More book reviews here.

  • The PowerBook

    PR Week (subscription required) published the PowerBook this week, featuring 500 of the most prominent people in PR, it had a selection of questions that painted an interesting portrait of the people listed. BlackBerry’s at the ready, with leisure time facilitated by iPods and TiVo-equipped home entertainment systems, they are used to dining in London’s best restaurants – there wasn’t too many surprises amongst the preferences of the 500.

    It also struck me that the same questions could paint an interesting picture of the digital marketing blogosphere. What would my own responses look like?

    Name: Ged Carroll

    Job: Lead consultant (EMEA), Digital Strategies Group

    Address: Waggener Edstrom Worldwide 10 Southampton Street London WC2E 7HA

    Telephone: +44 20 7632 3800

    Born: 19XX

    Home town: That’s a complex question. The place I felt most at home is Hong Kong. I grew up in the north west of England and the ancestral family farm in the west of Ireland. For better or worse, London is where currently where I call home.

    Lives: London

    Family: No

    Best career move: Getting made redundant from my blue-collar job in the oil industry, which set me on my current career path. Little did I know what that would entail.

    Which company / brand do you most admire? Rolex

    Which business / organisation leader do you most admire? Larry Weber – who was the first agency leader that I worked for. It also reminded me that its disappointing to meet your heroes. He is a lovely, but far from perfect character.

    Boss who most inspired you: Cathy Pittham, who was the managing director of the first agency I worked for down in London.

    Most essential read: Wired magazine

    Most essential viewing / listening: Wall Street Journal Tech News Briefing podcast

    Favourite web link: pbs.org/cringely

    Favourite gadget: Apple MacBook Pro

    Most respected journalist: Robert X. Cringely (aka Mark Stephens)
    Most respected politician: A toss up between former president Mary Robinson, Moshe Dayan and Michael Collins (and yes I do know the last two are dead).

    What is your favourite place for lunch? Wagamama

    Name one thing about yourself that may surprise others: I used to be a shift leader in an oil refinery

    Guilty pleasure: too many to mention including vinyl records, streetwear and mechanical watches

    Your ideal epitaph: to not have an epitaph, at least not for a good while.

  • jPod

    It was a pleasure to read jPod. I like the writing of Douglas Coupland, he’s like a lightning rod for the zeitgeist for the knowledge economy. I’ve grown up and moved through my career with his works as a kind of literary soundtrack playing in the background. His writing moves from the monotony and empty-sadness of generation x in the 1990s through to the surreal humour of the present day.

    jPod is an updated world-view that builds upon Microserfs and Generation X. It is has a certain amount of recursion to these works and Douglas Coupland also appears in the book as a character. This recursion and self-referencing is fun for loyal readers and mirrors modern culture with its hipsters wearing ironic trucker caps, drain pipe jeans and Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirts and listening to bad mash-ups of 1980s music radio fodder.

    The non-linear, multi-voice, collective approach in writing mirrors modern environments were online predominates. The only downside to this was that I was quite happy to put the book down and not revisit for a fair while because there wasn’t the same sense of suspense or urgency. The book took me four weeks to read, not because it was hard or inaccessible and I did enjoy it – I guess this drifting along is an analogue to the life that Coupland is trying represent.

    The fantastic dark humour of jPod mirrors a society facing world-war three in the Middle East, global warming and the meltdown of the relationship between employer and employee where not even greed can be trusted anymore.

    Deep down there however is the essential truth about the Kafta-esque nature of working in a knowledge economy company, particularly software or web services. The politics aren’t right, but they’re close enough.

    Go out and get it here. The author’s online presence is here. More book reviews here.