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.

  • Roxanne Shante + more

    The new Roxanne Shante biopic looks amazing and you know the soundtrack is going to be good. Roxanne Shante was like a breadth of fresh air in the early rap scene. She had an amazing technique and was well able to cut male competitors down to size. Roxanne Shante is a legend despite her limited profile.

    Dr. Penelope Boston: “Seeking the Tricorder: The Hunt for Extraterrestrial Life” | Talks at Google – YouTube – interesting challenges in terms of identification, methodology and analysis. The trial-corder like the Star Trek communicator has been inspiring technologists for decades. More on innovation here.

    The South China Morning Post have launched a news site for an international audience focused on the Chinese technology sector – Abacus. Given the amount of blogs that used to cover the China tech sector that have disappeared, this is a welcome addition. Its a nice looking site, it has great interactive design and a good editorial team. My one complaint is that it doesn’t have an RSS feed which is a real bummer.

    Unsupported | The Greatest Stories Retold – interesting attempts at really short form storytelling. It doesn’t work well in Safari as a web browser. Something to provide creative inspiration for those 15 second ad spot scripts.

    Re-evaluating Media is a piece of research put together that tried to rebalance expectations on more traditional media. Whilst there was room to land meaningful points (TV is better at mass reach for a given CPM), and there is an argument to be made for a media neutral approach where the media mix fits the communications problem to be solved. Instead they made bigger leaps and had a methodology that was optimistic at best – this became the focus of debate among people that I knew. There are arguments to be made about the wider role of brand building which would better help traditional broadcast advertising more.

  • Techmeme ride home & other things this week

    Techmeme ride home podcast

    Techmeme Ride Home by Techmeme on Apple Podcasts – nice summary of the biggest stories in the tech sector on a 15 minute podcast. Techmeme started as a tech focused news aggregator, but this Techmeme ride home podcast is really handy to listen to on my commute. 

    FK Twigs x Spike Jonze

    HomePod — Welcome Home by Spike Jonze — Apple – FKA Twigs dances along in a mind bending video that’s part LSD trip and part old time Hollywood musical. Just a shame that its advertising the Apple HomePod. More related content here.

    Stephen Hawking Voice Generator (play/download) ― LingoJam – kind of like the Speak n Spell you had when you were a kid but more adaptable. Hawking came to view his voice generator as part of his personality. When it was glitching out at the end of its natural life, a tremendous effort was put into replicating its sound for Hawking. The story in itself says a lot about how we relate to technology.

    Let’s Go Twitter – I haven’t watched a film at the cinema in a while so am probably way late to this creative. I ended up being really confused by this advert. Visually, its a feast for the eyes, but still confusing. I love Twitter but good lord do they honestly think that advertising will solve what they seem to have diagnosed as a UX issue in on boarding for a new account?

    Supermarket chain REWE empowered shoppers to choose the sugar content of its own-brand chocolate pudding. During the campaign, REWE distributed puddings that had 20%, 30%, and 40% less sugar alongside its original formula; the favorite formula (30% won!) will be permanently available for sale at the supermarket. Of course, one could say that there is a bias in the survey design, but this idea of co-creation and a transparent discussion about sugar is a welcome change. via Trendwatching.

  • Blazed & other things

    Blazed

    I was having an online conversation with friends in the game about our favourite advertising, and this one came up. I hadn’t seen it before. It’s a public service announcement from New Zealand: Blazed – Drug Driving in Aotearoa.

    Guinness Rutger Hauer ads

    I also managed to find all the Rutger Hauer ‘Pure Genius’ ads done for Guinness. A lot of it looks like fresh thinking but mainstream production now due to CGI and After Effects, but at the time it was like nothing else that you would have seen

    Nazira

    I have been listening to this mix by Nazira. Nazira is from Almaty, Kazakhstan and plays at Berlin’s Room 4 Resistance parties. There’s also a great interview with her on the Discwoman site

    Fieldnotes Newsletter

    First issue of Fieldnotes newsletter is out! | Chad Dickerson’s blog – I used to work at Yahoo! when Chad was there, so can vouch for the newsletter being all killer, no filler. Chad headed up Yahoo!’s incubator Brickhouse. I can also recommend a second newsletter Brain Reel by Gemma Milne.

    For A Few Dollars More

    Revisiting For A Few Dollars More – I love the pace, the way it was shot and the storytelling. It also has Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood teaming up – EPIC. When I was a child I was confused the Lee Van Cleef playing two different characters in the ‘Dollars Trilogy’. In The Good, The Bad and The Ugly he plays a psychopathic gun for hire. In For A Few Dollars More he plays the honourable Colonel Mortimer looking for justice against a bandit.

    Gian Maria Volontè played both protagonists in A Fistful Of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More – and died both times. Leone didn’t intend for the films to be a trilogy, but they work quite well together. More related content here.

  • Authenticity is changing porn + more

    How social media and our obsession with authenticity is changing porn | Dazed – “Authenticity and amateur (fall) into traps about not acknowledging porn performance as craft, labour, and work”, Sullivan says, referencing a piece in the SF Weekly in 2014 by performer Siouxsie Q. In the article, the pornstar argues that, although authenticity is “one of feminist porn’s favourite words”, striving for an “authentic” sex scene undermines the labour that goes into creating a porn film. It erases the fact that performing is work, and not a hobby, which in turn justifies people watching free porn on the basis that it’s not worth paying for, says Sullivan. She thinks authenticity needs to be separated from the idea of actuality and redefined to mean the craft of the performance, in order to show people it is work and not fun and games. – Interesting the way it echoes wider media concerns from photographers, to journalists and influencers. The championing of authenticity in language is very now. It will we interesting to see how authenticity is changing porn continues.

    Apple’s iPhone X is the Instant Scapegoat for Samsung’s Failure to Win OLED Orders from Chinese Vendors – Patently Apple – “Other smartphone makers, who Samsung had hoped would incorporate OLED panels, have been slow to make the transition due to their expense and are sticking to liquid crystal displays.”

    I, Cringely Prediction #7 — 2018 will see the first Alexa virus – I, Cringely – There are presently more than 15,000 Alexa skills that have been officially approved by Amazon and are available for download. These skills do everything from launching programs to gathering data to setting reminders. Though relatively simple, each is still a cloud app that can connect tens of millions of Echo products to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

    Facebook plans to thwart election ad fraud with postcards | The Next Web – guessing that they haven’t heard of mail forwarding services? Also according the Mueller report Russia had operatives in-country

    News UK to advertisers: Run your Facebook ads on our sites | Digiday – and so the other shoe drops. The Murdoch family newspapers have led the way in mainstream media pointing out the flaws in Google and Facebook advertising in what looked to me like a sustained campaign. I am not saying that anything they’ve said is wrong, but now we get to see a ‘possible’ motivation

    EU-South Korean project to demonstrate 5G system at 2018 winter games | eeNews Europe – an overlooked part of the Winter Olympics. More Korea related content here.

  • Super Bowl LII & other things

    Super Bowl LII adverts

    It was the Super Bowl LII in the US which means a festival of TV advertising

    If Super Bowl LII had a star it would be Tide’s ad as  the most interesting because of the way it let the audience ‘in’ on the advert playing off against the cliches used in US advertising:

    • The car ad
    • The pharma ad with its disclaimers
    • The beer ad
    • Perfume ad
    • The rustic setting based ad (for conservative folks)
    • The car insurance ad
    • The luxury ad

    Brittle Chinese sensitivities

    Less about enjoyment and more about interest in social campaigns. Chinese netizen outrage at perceived slights is now affecting channels blocked in China.

    mercedes benz

    Mercedes-Benz put up a filler motivational post on Instagram quoting the Dalai Lama. Instagram isn’t available in China, but that didn’t stop the Chinese web getting angry. Ok when I said the Chinese web, I meant a particular faction of it young people with extreme nationalist tendencies called 愤青 fenqing (said fen-ching). They are a diverse group in terms of beliefs, but a simple view would be to think of the nationalism of Britain First supporters, but with Chinese sensibilities.

    Expect the threat of a Chinese government inquiry. Mercedes for their part apologised on Weibo:

    ..extremely wrong information

    Which caused further outrage as netizens wanted an apology on Instagram. So Mercedes apologised again. Mercedes is stuck between a rock and a hard place, an apology like that on Instagram would blow back on them outside China.

    What you are likely to see is a greater degree of self censorship by brands.

    Lunar new year

    Talking of China we’re starting to run into the lunar new year advertising season and my favourite so far has been this one by Nokia. It also ties quite nicely into a campaign that they ran online over Christmas.

    nokia

    The focus on family moments shows a maturity in Nokia’s advertising versus many competitors who talk about features.

    Taiko

    Taiko versus a vintage big band sound

    Mark Moore

    I have been exploring mixes by London clubland legend Mark Moore.