Ged Carroll

Category: media | 媒體 | 미디어 | メディア

It makes sense to start this category with warning. Marshall McLuhan was most famous for his insight – The medium is the message: it isn’t just the content of a media which matters, but the medium itself which most meaningfully changes the ways humans operate.

But McLuhan wasn’t an advocate of it, he saw dangers beneath the surface as this quote from his participation in the 1976 Canadian Forum shows.

“The violence that all electric media inflict in their users is that they are instantly invaded and deprived of their physical bodies and are merged in a network of extensions of their own nervous systems. As if this were not sufficient violence or invasion of individual rights, the elimination of the physical bodies of the electric media users also deprives them of the means of relating the program experience of their private, individual selves, even as instant involvement suppresses private identity. The loss of individual and personal meaning via the electronic media ensures a corresponding and reciprocal violence from those so deprived of their identities; for violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.”

McLuhan was concerned with the mass media, in particular the effect of television on society. Yet the content is atemporal. I am sure the warning would have fitted in with rock and roll singles during the 1950s or social media platforms today.

I am concerned not only changes in platforms and consumer behaviour but the interaction of those platforms with societal structures.

  • Hypeddit + more news

    Hypeddit

    Welcome To Hypeddit – brilliant selection of free tracks. Hypeddit from a content perspective is rather like an old school DJ pool, but online. I wonder how long Hypeddit can last in the face of the music labels copyright enforcement industrial complex

    Business

    Communities Dominate Brands: Matchmaker Matchmaker Make Me a Match – What if Microsoft sold Nokia back to Nokia – much as I would like to see a Jobsian style brand resurrection the market dynamics have moved on and Nokia has bigger issues to deal with. More wireless related posts here.

    Gadget

    It’s almost impossible to make money selling Android phones | Boy Genius Report – which shows the hard place where Microsoft, Nokia and BlackBerry have been. More wireless related posts here.

    Daring Fireball: Apple’s Share of Phone Handset Industry Profits Climbs to 92 Percent – John Gruber on Apple’s ‘profit monopoly’ in the smartphone sector

    Media

    The truth about blogging on Medium | TheNextWeb – why are we having to even have this discussion, Medium is the new Blogger or Typepad

    Online

    Hillary Clinton Takes Aim at Uber, Wall Street In First Economic Speech – it was inevitable the sharing economy was going to get political

    Security

    Privacy talk at DEF CON canceled under questionable circumstances | CSO Online – the information that’s out there points to a national security letter being served on the developers

    The Use of Encrypted, Coded and Secret Communications is an “Ancient Liberty” Protected by the United States Constitution – which puts the law at odds with the U.S. intelligence industrial complex

    Software

    What’s Weixin? A Short Guide to China’s Super App – What’s on Weibo – 100 million users in 400 days. What’s interesting is the way Weixin has managed to cram so much functionality in one app and not compromising on ease of use. This is in sharp contrast to the rise of app constellations

  • The July 7th bombing post

    The tenth anniversary commemoration of the July 7th bombings across London caused me to reflect on my memories of the day.

    Unlike a lot of London, I was non-plussed about the winning Olympic bid as I had a keen idea of the kind of disruption it would bring to my part of London. The events that happened on July 7, rolled out in a more gradual way for me, so there wasn’t a moment etched in my memory in the same way as I had watching the TV footage of the airplanes hitting the World Trade Center towers. My memory is less distinct. July 7, 2005 started just like most other summer week days for me at the time.
    London tube bombing
    I was working as part of the European marketing team at Yahoo! based out of 125 Shaftesbury Avenue, I had been working there for a few months. My journey to work on the central line was the usual experience of arriving to the office as a hot and sweaty mess due to the overcrowded trains. I wasn’t aware of the tube bombing that happened roughly about the time that I had travelled in.

    It was before 10am when I wandered into the legal department who where in the north east corner of our building on Shaftesbury Avenue. I was trying to get a rush on a press release approval. We were high enough up that it offered a good view over central London north of Oxford Street. Whilst chatting to Liyen McCoy, both of us  heard a crack that sounded to me like exhaust backfiring on a car. Liyen mentioned that she hoped it wasn’t a bomb, I didn’t think it was at the time. In retrospect, it could have been just a coincidence, or it was the sound of the bomb going off on the bus as it passed through Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury.

    I went back to my desk and word started to come through from via the internal grapevine from engineering, through the editorial staff and on to the marketing team. Something was up as the first pictures started to hit flickr and attract a surge in viewer numbers. It was pretty soon after this that I noticed that the cell phone network had gone down, I was on Orange (now EE) at the time; soon other colleagues on Vodafone and O2 noticed similar drop in network access. Soon after that email stopped working properly.

    A little later, word came back into our corner of the office that the editioral team where taking the Yahoo! UK home page offline. They were going to strip the adverts off the page (partly because it wouldn’t be great to brand adverts positioned against news of this nature, and partly to reduce the strain we were seeing on our servers due to the web traffic coming in). The home page would be hard coded in HTML using Dreamweaver and updated manually.

    This gave the UK readers a fighting chance of getting up to date news, meanwhile I struggled to get any web page at all over the office network as web access degenerated into a series of blank browser screens.  My desk phone couldn’t dial out, in fact the only thing that did seem to work was Yahoo! messenger. Rumours started to swirl around the the government had somehow locked down all the networks near the bomb sites, but the fact that messenger worked indicated to me that it was just too much traffic. Eventually I managed to contact Jonathan Hopkins who was the account manager on the Yahoo! account at Bite back then. I found out from him that all his colleagues were accounted for and safe.

    There was concerns that there maybe other blasts and I can’t remember going out for lunch as we were all advised to stay in the building.  Eventually we were allowed home and I walked the six miles back to Bow. I didn’t know my way, my smartphone at the time was a Palm Treo 650 which worked off GPRS, or if you were really lucky EDGE, not that would have made a difference. I didn’t have cell reception to look up maps online. Even if I had got access to online maps, the Treo 650 didn’t have a built in GPS unit, that didn’t come along until Nokia launched the N95 18 months later.

    I remember I followed the crowds heading east and kept on going as their numbers started to thin. Occasionally I rooted around in my bag for my dog-eared spiral bound A-to-Z atlas of London to make sure I was going the right way by checking road names against the map. Eventually I managed to find my way to Stepney Green tube station and from there it was plain sailing. As I got near home I managed to text my parents to let them know I was alright. More London themed posts here.

  • Data protection czar + more

    The Mark News | A national balancing act: security of a country and privacy of the individual – interesting read by Giovanni Buttarelli, the EU’s data protection czar. What’s interesting about his essay is how poorly European countries measure up according to their own data protection czar. That in itself is damning

    After 80 per cent circulation drop in ten years, NME print edition to go free | Press Gazette – interesting that it is moving to more of a lifestyle publication de-emphasising music; streaming has made music consumption less conscious

    McDonald’s hopes to bounce back with customised burger | Marketing Interactive – interesting that McDonalds are trying to go upmarket, interesting how they are having reengineer their processes. Will this go beyond Burger Kings  have your burger your way?

    Lunch with the FT: Pavel Durov – FT.com – interesting that he travels on a passport from St Kitts and that the Telegram engineering team only stay a few months at a time in one place. They use shell companies to hide what office space they use to shelter from ‘unnecessary influence‘. It’s like something out of one of William Gibson‘s later novels (paywall)

    China’s Developing Technology Sector | Stratfor – (paywall)

    Why China won’t listen to Western scientists about genetically modifying the human embryo – Quartz – inside China, there are people who are opposed to international standards, citing cultural differences. This force is actually quite powerful sometimes. More China related posts here

    Quintessence – Bitcoin: What you didn’t know but always wanted to ask – interesting references to Blockchain

    Biology of Distributed Information Systems: Strong Artificial Intelligence is Emerging as we Talk – interesting primer on the current status of AI

    The Servitude Bubble — Medium – lets reclaim the economy from the appholes – in the dot com boom the capital came from VCs, this time the capital comes from the sweat of the people at the bottom of the social pile

  • Nuon & other things

    VM Labs

    Remembering Nuon, the gaming chip that nearly changed the world—but didn’t | Ars Technica UK – it was interesting as a bet against commotisation of PC hardware rather like CDi by Philips by VM Labs. VM Labs Nuon processor looks more like a product of today as the pendulum in semiconductors has swung away from general purpose to tailored designs again. When computing power was the most important thing; general purpose made sense. The move towards computing power per watt changed the balance completely over time towards tailored semiconductors.VM Labs main problem was being ahead of their time.

    Ideas

    RISC vs CISC: What’s the Difference? | EE Times – interesting how architectures have become largely irrelevant over the past few years. It makes sense when one thinks about Apple’s move to Intel. It also says a lot for Intel’s potential opportunity in mobile applications; if Intel doesn’t manage to fumble the ball on chip design, or semiconductor fab process improvements

    Luxury

    LVMH diversifies into Chinese food as sales decline | WantChinaTimes – interesting move. Luxury goods were ‘tools’ of status as is food gifts and restaurants – smart lateral play by LVMH. More luxury related posts here

    Media

    Exactly what does Cannes celebrate? | canalside view – interesting prespectives on Cannes. Cannes comes across as a client knees up. It could be so much more by increasing the knowledge sharing at Cannes

    Microsoft Said to Exit Display Ad Business, Cut 1,200 Jobs – Bloomberg Business – one can only wonder what will happen in the phone business

    Online

    DuckDuckGo Blog : Play Ball! Live Scores for Every MLB Game – chipping away at Google piece-by-piece

    Security

    Sony Pictures: Inside the Hack of the Century, Part 2 – Fortune – a good reason not to register your Sony products because judging by this write-up of the Sony Pictures debacle

    These hackers warned the Internet would become a security disaster. Nobody listened. | The Washington Post – “If you’re looking for computer security, then the Internet is not the place to be,” said Mudge, then 27 and looking like a biblical prophet with long brown hair flowing past his shoulders. The Internet itself, he added, could be taken down “by any of the seven individuals seated before you” with 30 minutes of well-choreographed keystrokes (paywall) – more security related content here

    Technology

    OEM Conundrum – commoditisation, hyoer-competition

    Wireless

    EBN – Jim O’Reilly – Smartphone Saturation Becomes

  • HSBC PMI + more things

    HSBC PMI

    HSBC will no longer provide one of the best gauges of China’s economy – Quartz – but hopefully someone else will step up to do the sponsorship instead. The HSBC PMI measure was the most reliable economic measure coming out of China that was wasn’t skewed by state-owned enterprises (SOEs). SOEs get easy state bank loans where as the private SMEs that the HSBC PMI looks at don’t have that advantage and so provide a ‘truer’ picture of what is actually going on. Does this mean a longer term difficult position for HSBC as well as transparent economic data like the HSBC PMI?

    China

    Born Red – The New Yorker – interesting profile of Xi Jinping

    Culture

    Check out MelodySheep’s album on Bandcamp. More culture related content here.

    483 lines by Seoul-based Kimchi and Chips is a welcome break from 3d projection mapping for interesting visualisations. It reminds me of the work Troika turn out

    Economics

    A generation from now, most of the world’s GDP will come from Asia | Quartz – get ready for the new order of things

    FMCG

    I was doing some research and came across the collaboration between MelodySheep and General Mills to remix Lucky Charms adverts. His interpretation shows a darker side to the kids hunting for Lucky Charms

    Innovation

    SoftBank Robot Pepper Sells Out in a Minute – Japan Real Time – WSJ – via Aldebaran Robotics (paywall) – much of this is about Japanese culture’s positive reception to robots as it is to the quality of Pepper itself. There are other robots that can fill a similar kind of customer service role. Its really worth reading about how Japanese consumers interacted with their Sony Aibo

    Japan

    This wonderful film of Tokyo by Brandon Li which somehow feels as if it should be a Guinness advert, partly due to the narration by Tom O’Bedlam

    It is interesting how the Guinness brand has came to own strong storytelling in advertising.

    Media

    Cannes: Google’s agency-sales head wants to push creativity – Campaign Asia – ZOO – Google’s creative agency butts up against agencies to get creative briefs (paywall)

    Online

    2015/16 Fixture List Released | Barclays Premier League – interesting that the FA are recommending match-by-match hashtags to build conversations on Twitter

    I have been using Ben Haller‘s Fracture fractal screensaver for almost as long as I have used Mac OS X (back when it was called Puma). Michael Clark has a site for images used creating Fracture called Fractal of the Day with achingly beautiful tripped out abstract images. The Mac has traditionally been a home to lots of passionate small software development companies who code thoughtful apps. These apps then build a passionate user community around them.  
    mandelbroitset

    Security

    GCHQ spies discredit targets on the internet – Business Insider – about what I would expect them to be doing. More security related posts here.

    Technology

    I, Cringely The U.S. computer industry is dying and I’ll tell you exactly who is killing it and why – I, Cringely – cloud computing is economics not innovation