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.

  • Blade Runner 2049 & other things that made my day this week

    A new Blade Runner 2049 trailer, the suspense is killing me regarding how Blade Runner 2049 will stake up against Ridley Scott’s original film. Blade Runner was the last truly great analogue film and yet it is still difficult for digital to surpass the originals visual impact.

    McDonald’s seems to be going hard on supporting national service in different countries. Here is the Singapore treatment for the ‘Nasi Lemak’ burger. There is also a coconut pie (a bit like the fried apple pie), Cendol McFlurry (presumably containing green rice flour jelly and coconut ice cream) and a Bandung McFizz (rose syrup flavouring). It would be hard to get more Singaporean.

    In Korea, they are giving free meals to conscripts whose parents can’t visit them and providing a special menu in the Seoul Station branch so that parents travelling to see their sons in the early hours of the morning by train could have something more substantial than the breakfast menu.

    In both cases, it’s a canny move to catch families at a crucial life stage.

    Great radio adaption of Lem Deighton’s Ipcress Files – slightly different to the Michael Caine film version you may have seen which deviates from the book (I am guessing due to budget considerations)

    Why do graffiti writers get sent to prison for so long? | Dazed – On the same day that known graffiti writer Vamp was sentenced to 3 years for vandalism, a BBC presenter, Stuart Hall, was given 15 months for the sexual assault of 13 young girls over 20 years, between the ages of 9 and 17 – hard questions indeed.

    Chinese digger company LOVOL had mandarin pop act Chopstick Brothers, dance troop and a wheeled loader dance along to their hit ‘My little Apple’ at a trade show (i’m guessing in China). It takes the showmanship that JCB has employed and takes it to a higher level.

  • Vivienne Wei + more things

    Vivienne Wei

    WeChat consumer perspective  by Chinese video blogger Vivienne Wei. Vivienne Wei put together this great video about how WeChat is the Swiss Army knife of apps in China. It is a great consumer perspective on how WeChat works.

    Carl Jr resets

    Carl Jr is a casual eating restaurant chain in the US. It is owned by the same people who won Hardee’s. Carl Jr is known for producing frat boy / brogrammer-friendly adverts like these

    Wiser heads seem to have prevailed in the marketing department, so they came up with this ad to press reset using humour rather than the indignation of political correctness

    Vice, New Balance and footwork sub-culture

    Vice and New Balance have put together a documentary on the Japanese adoption of the footwork sub-culture. Japan has a history of adopting a subculture (like dancehall) and elevating it. Chicago’s footwork skills look like they are getting the same treatment

    Godzilla

    The King of Monster Island Godzilla is back in an anime film. The plot looks like Avatar – humans coming to wipe out planet for commercial / political benefits. Of course all of that plan will go to shit when they find out the inhabitants aren’t lanky blue people but the original kaiju bad boy and friends.

    Baby Driver

    I got to see Baby Driver. It is a curious mashup of a couple of film genres

    • 1980s style films popularised by John Hughes.
    • 1990s to the present day gritty heist films

    I was also reminded of the Tony Scott film True Romance

    The iPod Classic makes a come back in the film in a spectacular way, expect a minor cultural backlash against ‘radio’ as music service currently popular. Personally curated, shareable music and physical artefacts come to the fore. (Though I still can’t see young men proudly carrying rhinestone encrusted pink iPod Classics just yet). More related content here.

  • eSports discussion

    The rise of eSports as a form of entertainment is a popular discussion area in both media and technology. Brandon Beck is the co-founder of Riot Games (best known for League of Legends) on the rise of eSports from a cultural and business perspectives.  His ideas what online gaming future looks like; are interesting, if a little self-serving.

    eSports takeouts:

    • Interesting that Riot are trying to give players a better base to build their careers. How will this affect teams over individual player talent?  How long is their professional life? When do they burn out? What does post-eSports athlete life look like?
    • They acknowledge that competitive gaming will have a long runway to adoption rather than the hockey stick models predicted by financiers in this area. Traditional sports management professionals see eSports as a new opportunity.
    • Professional athletes come out of second and third generation gamers and parents who pursued traditional sports at a competitive level
    •  The new nature of competitive gaming has an exclusively young audience. The vast majority of content is streaming. The audience is cable cutters, which implies that they didn’t have traditional sports as a substitute content
    • Player access and the Asian ‘idol’ phenomenon seems to be very similar with ‘around game’ content. There is an immediacy to it. There is also a grey zone between the athlete and online influencers, I could see a crossover
    • I found it concerning that it revolves so much around China, given the rule by law approach to things that the Communist Party of China takes. It would take nothing to crush competitive gaming in China. Comments on the negative social impact of gaming doesn’t bode well

    More on professional online gaming here and more on Riot Games here. It will be interesting to see how Riot Games continues to develop under the ownership of Chinese technology company Tencent.

  • Per Eklund + other things

    Per Eklund

    Feast your eyes on Per Eklund’s record breaking ascent of Pikes Peak back in 2001 in a car that looked superficially like a Saab 93. It weighed just 1,000Kg and had 850BHP and four wheel drive. Eklund was 55 when he did this and still drives today alongside peers like Stig Blomqvist.

    Per Eklund trained originally as a driving instructor with fellow classmate Stig Blomqvist. He then went be a Saab factor team driver from 1970 to 1979. He was Swedish champion in 1978, ahead of Stig Blomqvist. Eklund won a World Rally Champion ship event in a privately entered Saab 99 Turbo in 1982, three years after Saab shuttered its works team.

    Per Eklund drove on selected events for Toyota Team Europe, focusing on African events of the World Rally Championship like fellow Swede Björn Waldegård.

    Like Waldegård, Per Eklund has had a long and successful career in rallycross. Probably his crowning achievement was setting a records on the Pikes Peak climb that wasn’t bettered for another ten years. Per Eklund beat best times set by fellow rally champions Michèle Mouton, Ari Vatanen and Walter Rohl

    Here’s a documentary (mostly in Swedish) about how they did it. It’s a surprisingly basic effort. More related content here.

    Back To The Future with pugs

    Winston and C-Milk currently live in Southern China and put out regular content on live in China. Their video discussing China’s ecosystem of fake Nintendo Famicom (NES) machines. Video games were banned for 15 years in China, so piracy stepped in to fill the vacuum. Check out the clone of Nokia’s Snake but with NES vibes.

    Or Super Mario 10 featuring Confucius

    I’d also recommend their perspective on China’s role in VR. President Xi Jin Ping said that VR was the cornerstone of development, and that China would pursue VR with everything it’s got. Gadget makers have piled in to make Samsung Gear-like googles.

    Social Cooling – really interesting hypothesis on how social platforms are changing consumer behaviour over time.

  • My decade of the iPhone

    A decade of the iPhone – last week has seen people looking back at the original launch. At the time, I was working an agency that looked after the Microsoft business. I used a Mac, a Nokia smartphone and a Samsung dual SIM feature phone.  At the time I had an Apple hosted email address for six years by then, so I was secure within the Apple eco-system. I accessed my email via IMAP on both my first generation MacBook Pro and the Nokia smartphone.

    Nokia had supported IMAP email for a few years by then. There were instant messaging clients available to download. Nokia did have cryptographic signatures on app downloads, but you found them on the web rather than within an app store.

    At the time BlackBerry was mostly a business device, though BlackBerry messaging seemed to take off in tandem with the rise of the iPhone.  The Palm Treo didn’t support IMAP in its native email application, instead it was reliant on a New Zealand based software developer and their paid for app SnapperMail.

    Microsoft had managed to make inroads with some business users, both Motorola and Samsung made reasonable looking devices based on Windows.

    The iPhone launch went off with the characteristic flair you would expect from Steve Jobs. It was a nice looking handset. It reminded me of Palm Vx that I used to have, but with built in wireless. Whilst the Vx had a stylus, I had used my fingers to press icons and write Graffiti to input text. It looked good, but it wasn’t the bolt from the blue in the way that others had experienced it.

    But in order to do work on the Palm, I had a foldable keyboard that sat in my pocket.

    By the time that the iPhone launched, I was using a developer version of the Nokia E90 which had an 800 pixel wide screen and a full keyboard in a compact package.

    Nokia e90 and 6085

    I had Wi-Fi, 3 and 3.5G cellular wireless. I could exchange files quickly with others over Bluetooth – at the time cellular data was expensive so being able to exchange things over Bluetooth was valuable. QuickOffice software allowed me to review work documents, a calendar that worked with my Mac and a contacts app.  There was GPS and Nokia Maps. I had a couple of days usage on a battery.

    By comparison when the iPhone launched it had:

    • GSM and GPRS only – which meant that wireless connectivity was slower
    • Wi-Fi
    • Bluetooth (but only for headphone support)
    • No battery hatch – which was unheard of in phones (but was common place in PDAs
    • No room for a SD, miniSD or microSD card – a step away from the norm. I knew people who migrated photos, message history and contacts from one phone to another via an SD card of some type

    I wasn’t Apple’s core target market at the time, Steve Jobs used to have a RAZR handset.

    As the software was demoed some things became apparent:

    • One of the key features at the time was visual voicemail. This allowed you to access your voicemails in a non-linear order. This required deep integration with the carrier. In the end this feature hasn’t been adopted by all carriers that support the iPhone. I still don’t enjoy that feature. I was atypical at the time as I had a SIM only contact with T-Mobile (now EE), but it was seemed obvious that Apple would pick carrier partners carefully
    • There was no software developer kit, instead Apple encouraged developers to build web services for the iPhone’s diminutive screen. Even on today’s networks that approach is hit-and-miss
    • The iPhone didn’t support Flash or Flash Lite. It is hard to explain how much web functionality and content was made in Adobe Flash format at the time. By comparison Nokia did support Flash, so you could enjoy a fuller web experience
    • The virtual keyboard was a poor substitute for Palm’s Graffiti or a hardware keyboard – which was the primary reason that BlackBerry users held out for such a long time
    • The device was expensive. I was used to paying for my device but wasn’t used to paying for one AND being tied into an expensive two year contract
    • Once iPhones hit the street, I was shocked at the battery life of the device. It wouldn’t last a work day, which was far inferior to Nokia

    I eventually moved to the Apple iPhone with the 3GS. Nokia’s achilles’ heel had been its address book which would brick when you synched over a 1,000 contacts into it.

    By comparison Apple’s contacts application just as well as Palm’s had before it. Despite the app store, many apps that I relied upon like CityTime, MetrO and the Opera browser took their time to get on the iPhone platform. Palm already was obviously in trouble, BlackBerry had never impressed me and Windows phone still wasn’t a serious option. Android would have required me to move my contacts, email and calendar over to Google – which wasn’t going to happen.

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