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.

MCN

MCN stands for multi-channel network, these are companies, often based in the likes of China and Japan who actively develop popular influencer channels. They work with influencers to help them improve the quality of their content and then build their audience. In return the MCN gets a cut of the revenue from the influencers channel. In some respects it is similar to the traditional model of record labels, in particular their A&R and ‘plugging’ functions.

Classic examples of MCN augmented influencer channels

Li Ziqi (李子柒)

Sichuan native Li had worked in a number of jobs including being a singer and DJ, prior to returning home to the countryside to care for a sick family member. She initially developed video content to help support the family business selling agricultural produce on TaoBao. Eventually she partnered with MCN Hangzhou Weinian Brand Management to shoot and distribute content. This partnership included building a 17.7 million strong subscriber base at the time of writing on YouTube.

Li has stopped producing content in 2021 due to a dispute with Hangzhou Weinian, the full details of which haven’t been disclosed.

John Daub

Daub is an American living in Japan. He started his career in Japan as an English teacher, settled down and married a local woman with whom he has a child. Eventually John Daub got experience in front of the camera as a reporter for NHK World. NHK World is the Japanese equivalent of the BBC World Service.

Eventually Daub took his NHK World experience online and create his own content alongside his occasional NHK World presenter work. Only In Japan filmed content around the country focusing on food, technology culture and places to visit. Daub partnered with the WAO Corporation in an MCN style relationship to built a channel called WAO RYU!Only in Japan.

Daub and WAO parted company in 2020. At the time the YouTube channel had 1.35 million subscribers. WAO has continued the add content to the channel but only managed to grow it to 1.44 million subscribers at the time of writing.

Daub set up a new channel and an audience of 277,000 subscribers. WAO and Daub’s separation seems to be more amicable than Li & Hangzhou Weinian Brand Management. But if they had remained combined, they would have likely become more successful.

MCN eco-system in China

The MCN eco-system in China has grown in leaps and bounds. This could be everything from houses of live streamers, that are basically e-commerce sweatshops through to TV programme level productions like Li’s channel content. Live streaming services featuring virtual gifting and e-commerce integration was responsible for that step change between 2018 and 2019. This happened despite Chinese government efforts to ‘purify’ internet content.

More related content can be found here.

November 4, 2023
Clustomers
Intuit Mailchimp are brave in terms of the the approach that they take to their marketing and Clustomers is a prime example of this.

Clustomers is a great campaign that builds on the frustrations that marketers face about segmentation and personalisation of communications. It is fantastically single-minded in its execution, which is what you want in an effective advert. I could have been seen how the rats nest of people could have come across as creepy rather than surreal and the art direction gets the tone right wonderfully.

But I think that the communications around clustomers to be more nuanced.

The Clustomers campaign

The Clustomers advert itself is the first point of evidence I would use is a brand building, distinctly non-personal campaign. The fact that I am writing about it, speaks a lot to its ‘talkability’. It has carved out its own small part of culture.

It looks to place MailChimp as the marketing technology vendor for start-ups and small to medium sized businesses. But like many political campaigns, it promises a simple solution to a challenge that might be more complex.

But this isn’t a campaign that will be only seen by the small business owner, or someone with a slide hustle. The message of personalisation might be received, without the nuanced understanding of marketing that MailChimp has demonstrated in the way that they’ve built the campaign. CFOs don’t have a sufficient understanding of marketing to understand this. For many of them it’s just a set of line items on the wrong side of a spreadsheet.

C-suite misconceptions

As I’ve said, I think that the message Clustomers gives is problematic in a wider context. A good deal of that problem is down to business founders and the C-suite having fundamental misconceptions on what marketing communications purpose is and how it does it.

Advertising isn’t fluffy or all about colouring in. It’s a legitimate and important tool for driving business success. The trouble is that CEOs, CFOs, founders and investors sometimes forget that fact. They’re sceptical about advertising at the best of times and often pull the plug when the economy feels wobbly.
Dr Grace Kite, Marketing Week

Clustomers fuels a perception that personalisation is the key to marketing and by implication performance marketing is the only marketing required. The reality is more complex. The Ehrensberg Bass Institute’s Byron Sharp talks of ‘smart mass marketing’ and brand building as being the key for the majority of marketing activity in conjunction with personalised communication. The Institute of Practioners in Advertising has been doing sterling work trying to educate the C-suite, but technology specialists like Adobe, Google and Meta have been negating a lot of that good work done.

Portumna

Prior to COVID-19, back when I presented a lot more in public I used to present the following slide and when I talked to it I probably reflected some of what MailChimp customers would look for, and was behind Clustomers.

Portumna is the closest market town to where my family originated. My cousin still works part-time on the family farm. Portumna has been a commercial centre for centuries because of geography. It sits at a strategic crossing of the River Shannon. The Shannon divides the east of Ireland from the west of Ireland and has been a shipping way from centuries past to the present day.

A number of the shops including grocery stores, hardware and farm supplies, the sub-post office and the local pharmacy are family businesses. At least four generations of shopkeepers in the town knew my family and did business with them over the centuries.

There were life-long relationships formed. When I go home, I am loyal to the grocery store and pharmacy that my Uncle and grandparents used. The shopkeepers understood the needs of relatives who lived in the area and the kind of farm that they ran. The kind of online marketing that clustomers seeks to bring forward, is the kind of relationships that were in place in Portumna for centuries.

But those relationships were not just about personalised communications. There was a wider cultural context and even ‘brand’.
- The fact that the family in question had built up trust in the community.
- That they were known to be ‘respectable’.
- That they had delivered for my family and people that they new in the past.
- These brands were local oligarchs. They had one or two competitors at best.
So the customer mental models around farm supplies, the butcher or the grocer were very strong and constantly reinforced. And this is the kind of stuff that advertising as part of non-personal communications is best at doing.
October 21, 2023
Technopolarity
Ian Bremmer at the Eurasia Group has been talking about Technopolarity throughout 2022 and has amped up the discussion in recent months.

Bremmer’s hypothesis is that big technology companies and their leaders will create power structures that will challenge the powers of governments. I was reminded of the different ‘country franchises’ that populated the future America of Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. Snow Crash envisaged a Randesque libertarian hellscape with no power centre.

The biggest technology firms are designing, building, and managing an entirely new dimension of geopolitics. In this new digital space, their influence runs deep, down to the level of individual lines of code. They’re writing the algorithms that decide what people see and hear, determine their economic and social opportunities, and ultimately influence what they think. Individuals will spend more time in digital space in 2022, at work and at home. Much of this time will be spent in the “metaverse”—an emerging, more immersive version of the web where all the problems of digital governance will be magnified. The metaverse (or more accurately, multiple metaverses) in turn will increasingly rely on economic systems based on decentralized blockchain platforms that governments are already struggling to control.
Bremmer, I., Kupchan, C. (January 3, 2022) Risk 2: Technopolar World. United States: Eurasia Group.

Aside from the power of the metaverse, Bremmer & Kupchan largely got things right. The Eurasia Group positioned technology giants along three axes. The degree to which the companies matched the following archetypes:
- National champions.
- Globalists.
- Techno-utopians.
In general, Chinese companies were national champions, while their American counterparts were predominantly globalists. The European Union has attempted and largely failed to bring a degree of control, curbing the excesses of technology companies.

China has cracked down on companies that it felt was too big. The digital space itself has a Randian view of global leadership, ignoring the consequences and the responsibility of their power.

Algorithms as destiny

Bremmer’s initial thinking on technopolarity was focused on the role of algorithms underpinning online services. More recently, he has focused beyond platforms to look at the nature of ‘artificial intelligence’ and its ability to upend geopolitics.

Emotional contagion

As far back as 2012, Facebook had conducted a study in ’emotional contagion’ by altering the news feeds for 700,000 users and it was all completely legal. The feeds were changed to reflect more positive, or negative content – to see if seeing more sad messages makes a person sadder. The experimental subjects were not given any warning and their emotional state was by analysing changes in their language on the platform.

And I am not even pointing out the effect that social media can have on its audiences in general without experimentation.

Elon Musk’s Technopolarity

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk; brought the concept of Technopolarity to life. In the book Isaacson discusses decisions and actions that Musk made over the Ukraine war. Musk because of his personal concern about Russian escalation, disabled the Starlink service covering occupied Ukrainian territory to disrupt Ukraine’s military efforts including marine drones. So Elon Musk essentially made a decision that directly affected US defence efforts to support Ukraine. It could have even resulted in the destruction of American military equipment donated to the defence of Ukraine.

Musk has had conversations with Vladimir Putin like he was a head of state and even the US government has been careful about how they deal with him.

“Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue”
Colin Kahl, former under-secretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon

Kahl’s attitude to Musk is at odds to the fate of former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio who went to jail after he was found to be a barrier to the NSA’s domestic surveillance plans, in particular the MAINWAY database. Nacchio was convicted of insider trading. Nacho’s successor also held outing after 4 years, discussions with the NSA went nowhere. A quick trawl of Twitter history would be enough to find evidence to put Musk on trial should the US government wish to do so. What’s happened to government power in the decades since Nacchio went to jail?

The New Yorker went on to describe Elon Musk’s power as ‘shadow rule‘. Musk isn’t elected. He isn’t even responsive to his shareholders. His Twitter account is a testament to his mercurial nature.

What’s more concerning for US government wonks is that Musk’s Tesla mega factory in Shanghai leaves him exposed to manipulation by the Chinese government. For instance, they could pressure him to turn off Starlink across the Pacific adversely affecting Taiwan, Japan, Australia and US forces in the region. The Ukrainian experience suggests that Musk would not hesitate to put American lives on the line, or see Taiwan handed over the horrific barbarity of Chinese invasion.

More related content here.
October 18, 2023
Climate despair
I started thinking about climate despair last month as I was researching my post on psychotherapy + culture.

Depth of climate despair

The driver was a research report that appeared in The Lancet in December 2021. Researchers surveyed 10,000 respondents aged between 16 – 25, in ten countries across the Asia Pacific region, North and South America, Europe and Africa. The respondents were drawn from Kantar’s LifePoints online research panel. Of those who started the survey less than 70 percent completed it. The gender split was slightly overweight towards males: 51·4% male, 48·6% female.

The survey was developed by 11 international consultants with expertise in climate change emotions, clinical and environmental psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry, human rights law, child and adolescent mental health, and young people with lived experience of climate anxiety. Which means that there was an incentive to come out with the findings they received and that may have biased the results. But the indications are clear in terms of direction around climate despair.

Key datapoints supporting the sense of climate despair amongst respondents:
- Survey respondents across all countries were worried about climate change (59% were very or extremely worried and 84% were at least moderately worried)
- Over half of those surveyed reported each of the following emotions: sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless or guilty
- 75% of those surveyed said that they think the future is frightening
Derek Read – “C̶l̶i̶m̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶C̶h̶a̶n̶g̶e̶ We Change”

The report says:

Distress about climate change is associated with young people perceiving that they have no future, that humanity is doomed, and that governments are failing to respond adequately, and with feelings of betrayal and abandonment by governments and adults. Climate change and government inaction are chronic stressors that could have considerable, long-lasting, and incremental negative implications for the mental health of children and young people.
Hickman, C.,Marks, E., Pihkala, P., Clayton, S., Lewandowski, R.E. & Mayall, E.E. (December 2021) Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey. (UK) The Lancet Planetary Health

The article then goes on to hold governments accountable for a moral harm on the young people. However, a good deal of the moral harm is also due to the way companies and NGOs actually talk about climate change.

Anecdotal evidence from therapists interviewed by the New York Times suggests that climate despair tends to be more prevalent in young female patients that they see. However, this might be down to a young men being less likely to see a therapist than a young woman.

Positive reinforcement

This video from WARC features research why it is ineffective to play into the constant environment doom loop if we want action. A change in approach should start to combat the deeply entrenched feeling of climate despair.

WARC highlighted research that positive environmental images motivate people to take action. The research paper in the Journal of Advertising Research is Are consumers moved by a crying tree or a smiling forest? Effects of anthropomorphic valence and cause acuteness in green advertising written by three Taiwanese researchers based on a number of studies, each with 35 – 50 participants.

Research key findings

The paper had four key findings:
- When the environmental issue is considered a sudden disaster, negative anthropomorphism is more persuasive.
- By contrast, when the environmental issue is viewed as an ongoing tragedy, positive anthropomorphism results in a more favourable attitude, higher willingness to pay, and more money being donated.
- Consumers’ connectedness to nature serves as the underlying mechanism in this messaging. If this level of connectedness to nature is low, nonprofit organizations and companies must alter these perceptions by choosing a more appropriate anthropomorphic valence and cause acuteness in their green advertising.
All of which seems to point to a possible challenge amongst both NGOs and companies over their inability to discern the difference between important and the most urgent elements. If collectively they can’t understand the categorisation, it’s no wonder that a significant minority of their audience slips into climate despair and is discouraged from taking a more active role.

Secondly, working on consumer’s connectedness to nature is a major communications JTBD (job to be done).
October 10, 2023
Digital abortion clinics
It says something about the time that we live in that digital abortion clinics is a normal phrase and that publications like Wired have to have rank the clinics on patient data security. Disclaimer: I lean pro-choice in my beliefs as I don’t have to make the kind of choices that many women have to. Secondly, the second order consequences of high risk procedures done the black market create new moral and ethical dilemmas.

Dystopian vibes

Matt M – Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex

Five years ago, if you had said digital abortion clinics to me it would have brought to mind the darker recesses of the cyberpunk realms created in novels by William Gibson or Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, or the Ghost In The Shell series of manga and anime created by Shirow Masamune.

The reality is more banal and horrifying all at the same time.

How we got here

Legal and regulatory environment

Family planning clinics that provide terminations have been under regulatory attack since the US Supreme Court ruling on Roe vs. Wade gave American women access to abortion in 1973. Roe vs Wade was challenged repeatedly in court and upheld in rulings given afterwards. Some of these rulings narrowed the definition of what procedures could be conducted and when they could be conducted. In June 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade with its finding on Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organisation. Abortion was no longer considered a constitutional right, which then meant pregnancy terminations became governed by a myriad of state laws both for, and against abortions.

Some states went as far as to provide a legal shelter for their medical staff against legal measures out of state.

Pharmaceuticals

Historically, medicinal herbs and drugs used to induce an abortion risked causing kidney and liver damage. But we now have drugs available that can provide a much safer alternative. It’s these drugs that the digital abortion clinics rely on. The two most common are:
- Misoprostol was developed in 1973. It’s used to induce abortions, but also has other uses including the prevention and treatment of both stomach ulcers and some forms of postpartum bleeding. It can also be used to induce labour during pregnancy.
- Mifepristone developed in 1980, is typically used to induce abortions in conjunction with Misoprostol. It is also used on its own to treat high blood sugar levels in patients who also have hypercortisolism.
Femtech

Femtech as a term has only been around since 2016, but investment in the area of women’s health related technology has been growing over a decade. A few things were driving this. The personal nature of smartphones as a device. The explosion in software tools that allowed you to write apps and the availability of wireless technology stacks that hardware easier to connect. Finally, countries like the US started working on data privacy standards in the health space which were very important.

2016 saw Nurx get funding for it to provide in-app ordering for birth control pills. So prescribing abortion inducing medications is a logical next step, in order to give women full control of their reproductive capabilities.

Telehealth

COVID-19 accelerated the normalisation of digitally mediated health services including telehealth consultations and digital abortion services are now exception. If a woman chooses to have an abortion, it’s a big decision and the popular apps covered by Wired seemed to have a wide variance of user experience / provision of care.

These clinics operate in different ways—some provide live video visits with doctors and nurse practitioners, while others offer asynchronous counseling—but many have experienced a record number of patient orders (and increased VC funding) over the past year.
Poli K. (August 21, 2023) The Most Popular Digital Abortion Clinics, Ranked by Data Privacy. United States: Wired magazine

Security issues

Those software tools that allowed apps to be written easily often included API calls that enable privacy infringing tracking. For instance, a byproduct of the software tools used to make LGBTQI dating app Grindr’s locative nature risked exposing precise location data of gay men. Which is of concern in more socially conservative environments. Women using some digital abortion clinics face similar challenges.

In US states, where the politicians thought that Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was a how-to guide, rather than a societal warning; prosecutions in abortion related cases are using mobile data and search history.

Wired worked with the University of Texas privacy lab to grade the post popular digital abortion clinics on the degree of risk they posed to their patients.

The results were concerning and these problems can’t be mitigated through the use of a VPN or in-app settings.

Third-party data app sharing and data collection were used by the likes of Palantir to aid targeting people of interest in the global war on terror (G-WAT in security circles), and could be used in a similar way against women, if the state government were so inclined.

The Wired article that inspired this post here. More health-related content here.
September 13, 2023