Ged Carroll

Category: jargon watch | 術語定義 | 용어의 정의 | 用語の定義

Jargon watch as an idea was something that came from my time reading Wired magazine. I found that in my work terms would quickly spring up and just as quickly disappear. So it made sense to capture them in the moment.

The best way of illustrating jargon watch is by example. I came across the term black technology through mainland Chinese friends. One of the key things that Chinese consumers think about technology products is the idea of ‘black technology’. This makes no sense to your average western reader. It equates to cool and innovative.

The term itself comes from a superior technology featured in a Japanese manga series plot. As an aside the relationship between Chinese and popular Japanese culture is becoming increasingly attenuated due to Chinese nationalism.

What might be black technology this year might be humdrum in six months as the companies quickly catch up. Black technology is a constant moving target, but generally its sophisticated and likely has a cyberpunk feeling to it.

I keep an eye out for jargon like this all the time, hence jargon watch. I find this content in my professional reading and in the sources that I follow online. What makes something worthwhile to appear here is purely subjective based about how I feel about it and how much I think it resonates with my ideas or grabs my attention. A lot of British youth culture doesn’t make it because it doesn’t have that much of an impact any more beyond the UK.

  • Truth decay

    Truth decay was a concept that I came across when reading Monocle’s Forecast issue.

    Donald Trump
    President Donald Trump

    Michael D Rich is the head of the The RAND Corporation – a not-for-profit think tank. When he was interviewed and described as being preoccupied with ‘truth decay’. Truth decay occurs when society and the body politic can’t even agree on basic facts.

    • Increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data
    • A blurring of the line between opinion and fact
    • The increasing relative volume and resulting influence of opinion and personal experience over fact
    • Declining trust in formerly respected sources of facts

    Truth decay. One point that we’ve made over and over again is that no important problem can be solved in the US within the span of just a four-year presidency or a two-year Congress. And the way those problems have been surmounted in the past is consensus and compromise. That’s impossible if two sides can’t agree on the basic facts.

    Thought Leaders – The Forecast 2020 Monocle magazine

    All of this sounds like the rhetoric used to describe Vladislav Surkov and his work for the Russian government, or Dominic Cummings and Cambridge Analytica. The idea is that language and truth no longer mean anything. There is no right, there is no left, there is no ideology except the other group and the desire for power.

    The RAND Corporation is America’s foremost think tank. It spun out of Douglas Aircraft Corporation. From national security it expanded to social and economic areas. It now has its own grad school and nine different research facilities. It’s website is a good source of resources across a range of areas.

  • Treasure hunt

    Treasure hunt

    Treasure hunt as defined by NPD is the process of consumers bargain hunting. It might be discounted pricing on items or looking for substitute pre-owned products.

    Sale
    Sale

    Discounted items used to be seen in the retail trade as the preserve of older consumers alongside couponing. But as empirical experience going along to discount outlets show bargain hunters reach across social classes, income levels and age groups. Discounted products accounted for 3 percent growth in retail, even while retail declined by 1 percent overall in the last quarter.

    There hasn’t been as much of an exploration into whether its the discounts that people want or whether its the thrill of the hunt itself, especially when Google makes it much easier online.

    As for pre-owned goods, whilst NPD thinks that this is a millennial trait – vintage clothing stores, crate digging for records and and eBay are evidence that this trait isn’t new. I was reminded of being told that the collective memory is about eight years or so. So this explains how trends come back and get regurgitated or remixed by trendspotters and agencies.

    Admittedly the motivation that they are ascribing to vintage shopping by millennials and gen-z adds environmental aspects to vintage consumption. (Though is probably quality aspects as well as apparel globalisation and fast fashion have gone hand-in-hand in the demand for heirloom design).

  • Dark mode + more things

    Opinion | Living in Dark Mode – The New York Times – of the Hong Kong liberation movement was a plot device in a William Gibson novel, I would expect him to write a character like Karen. (Paywall) – dark mode is a great metaphor for the dystopian ennui. Yet I find it much easier to work in dark mode on my computer, which provides an interesting contradiction to idea

    Hong Kong Protests (October 31)

    As facial recognition tech races ahead of regulation, Chinese residents grow nervous about data privacy | South China Morning Post – interesting that concerns are starting to appear around privacy and biometrics

    Will Reddit Ads or Facebook Ads Have Lower CPC? – yes

    The white working class is a political fiction | The Outline – It turns the working class into something people are, not a function of what they do. It becomes a cultural description totally divorced from labor and wealth, only to be gleaned from outward displays of “class” that come with intelligence, appearance, taste, and all those things that make up meritocratic ideas of “workers.”

    The Uber Bubble: Why Is a Company That Lost $20 Billion Claimed to Be Successful? – early similar to a lot of dot com businesses

    An update on YC China – Silicon Valley retreating from China.

    Daring Fireball: Tim Cook Appears Alongside Trump in Re-Election Campaign Ad Shot in Mac Pro Plant in Austin – ironic given Apple’s actions in Hong Kong

    How a Zara shirt raises ethical issues in sustainable fashion — Quartzy – (paywall)

    Is TikTok really a national security threat? | Slate – yes it is

    Dynamic Norms Promote Sustainable Behavior, Even if It Is Counternormative – Sparkman & Walton – Association for Psychological Science paper on dynamic messaging

    Mobile: Social – Unpacking what holds the loyalty industry back… from what it could be. | LinkedIn – wider implications around people who’ve been conditioned by mobile ( and other technologies towards internet, multi-channel TV etc) to expect instant gratification in general

    Zuckerberg’s Anti-China Rhetoric Roils Facebook Employees — The Information – Facebook is grappling with its large community of Chinese employees, some of whom are becoming more vocal and critical in internal company forums over what they claim is a bias against mainland China. (paywall)

    Chinese netizens think Mark Zuckerberg betrayed China – The Facebook CEO has been widely admired in China, but his more recent negative comments about the country aren’t going over well | Abacus – why should Zuckerberg care

  • qCPM

    qCPM is emblematic of the state of online advertising. qCPM stands for quality cost per mille. It is used interchangeably with vCPM – valuable cost per mille. The implication being that normal advertising impressions are tainted or of little value.

    Librarian at the Card Files at Senior High School in New Ulm Minnesota ..., 10/1974

    Tainted by advertising fraud, click bots, bad neighbourhoods and faulty data. It is estimated that What other industry would sell its seconds products as the norm?

    So why do you need qCPM? Here is are some examples of the kinds of fraud it would look to catch out

    • Connected TV fraud. Banner ads on a mobile app are spoofed to make it look as if they are video ad placements on connected TV platforms. These were then sold on over ad exchanges
    • Fake pages – Bid requests that included the URLs of pages that didn’t exist
    • Bot networks – impersonate people and generate ad requests on platforms.
    • Plagarised fake versions of news sites

    These were just some of the techniques used by the largest ad frauds.

    There is a constant game of hide-and-seek going on as marketers try to keep up with the criminal activity in online advertising. The criminals always remain at least one step ahead at all times.

    Things are going to get worse. Privacy settings and ad blocking is creating biases in audience data and access that will only get worse with time. More related posts here.

    Scott Galloway claims that Apple’s anti-privacy measures against online advertising are part of a luxury industry in privacy.

    More information

    The Rise Of The qCPM: Rewarding Quality In Programmatic Buying | AdExchanger

  • ICE-ing

    ICE-ing – a method of protest using vehicles with internal combustible engines

    Sometimes writing posts are a matter of serendipity. I was out walking in Stepney Green and came across a series of electric vehicle charging points. I hadn’t paid any attention to them before.

    Right about the time that I noticed them; I saw that the parking bays in front of the charging points were all taken up by petrol or diesel engined vehicles. This being London were parking spaces tend to be a premium, I took a picture of the dissonant scene and quickly moved on.

    Untitled

    I came in and then read a piece of how truck owners in the US were trolling Tesla supercharging points. Car culture is still huge and overwhelmingly celebrating petrol engined vehicles. But in the US there is a definite sub-text to the protests; one of class war. Metropolitan elite Democrats versus middle America truck-owning Republicans hence ice-ing.

    I revisited the photo that I took earlier in Stepney Green. All the vehicles in the photo were mid-range Mercedes cars with the exception of the Nissan pick-up truck. What would the odds have been of a super-mini in the row of parked vehicles if this was just about parking spaces? Was it British ice-ing

    It didn’t seem organised; but more of an organic system. Some first ‘person like me’ committed the transgressive act of parking in a charging bay. This then gave ‘permission’ for others to do it as well and the spaces filled up.

    There are a number of reasons for a consumer to not want to purchase an electric car when looking for a vehicle:

    • Cost
    • Energy density / range
    • Speed of recharging
    • Charging point network
    • Vehicle choice

    A bigger and harder to crack issue for vehicle manufacturers is one of values. Electric cars don’t have a culture behind them. They may have good road performance but they are the wholemeal bread of the automotive world. Something you should so, rather than something you are passionate about driving. Internal combustion engines won’t go quietly into the night.

    BMW going into formula E and launching the i8 using the design language from the M1 was a nod towards making electric sexy. But on its own its like spitting in a hurricane. One Japanese vehicle manufacturer knew how to make electric (and petrol) vehicles exciting through

    • Customisation
    • Tinkering
    • Community
    • Noise
    • Spectacle

    Unfortunately for the automotive industry that vehicle manufacturer is Tamiya. Tamiya is a Shizuoka based manufacturer of remote control cars for hobbyists.

    Maybe the answer isn’t about marketing but about engineering?

    You can change the fuel without changing the excitement, noise or spectacle.

    Hydrogen powered combustion engines offer similar energy density and performance to petrol cars, but with water as the waste product rather than carbon monoxide. Battery technology currently relies on a lithium and most of the world’s supply comes out of a high desert in Chile – we’ve replaced one finite resource (oil) with another (lithium and rare earth metals).

    Toyota is already experimenting with hydrogen in Japan. BMW have done pilot programmes in the past and hydrogen as been trialled in heavy goods vehicles.

    More consumer behaviour related posts here.