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.

  • Howard Dean

    Howard Dean was feted by the media before the nominations started, because of a vocal and visible core of supporters, but then disappeared as the votes were cast. IT Conversations has a very interesting recording of a speech by Joe Trippi who was responsible for Howard Dean’s democratic party campaign at the recent O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. The Dean campaign looked to overthrow the system of interest group money purchasing television spots and presidential ads and so an election. He was inspired by the dialogue empowered by different web technologies.

    Joe Trippi admitted that he was defeated by the system of lobbyists, money and traditional media. Dean started with 137,000 USD in the bank, 437 supporters nationally and a campaign team of seven. Dean did manage to use the Internet to get grassroots support to achieve an unparalleled amount of campaign funding from over 300,000 supporters.

    The use of Meetup.com to get online supporters to meet up and then plan real world grassroots action over the water cooler, or over the garden fence was a key element of the campaign.

    Trippi said that the internet community do not get the harsh realities of real world politics – money matters. It has also shone a spotlight on the established political machine of special interest groups.

    Is Trippi the next Peter Mandelson? I don’t know but his tactics to promote Howard Dean have raised awareness of the web as an effective political tool. The key problem with the Internet based campaign is it couldn’t respond to the repetition of negative television advertisements and negative new stories in the established media. So there is hope for PR people and ad agencies yet.

    As an aside I would be interested to see how online grassroots lobbying communities like MoveOn (from the people that gave us the original Flying Toasters screensavers back in the day) will influence the political debate. More related content here.