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.

  • WSJ Online tenth anniversary

    10th anniversary of WSJ Online

    The Wall Street Journal Online or as it calls itself the WSJ Online has been celebrating its tenth birthday with some retrospectives and future gazing.

    WSJ Online dot com disasters

    A couple of the articles caught my eye.The Best of the Worst by Kathryn Meyer (May 3, 2006) celebrates the suckiest ideas of the first dot com boom.

    CyberRebate

    CyberRebate did what it said on the tin; they charged you an outrageous price for an item and then promised you a rebate, they hoped to make money on the redemption drop-out – they were overwhelmed and drowned in a sea of debt.

    Digital currency

    Digital currency ideas (Beenz and Flooz) withered on the vine as they weren’t as universal as Mastercard or cash. PayPal survived because it kicked Western Union’s ass and we could all be credit-card merchants.

    iSmell

    iSmell was a device designed to release smells appropriate to the pages you surf (don’t even think about it, get your mind out of the gutter this instant) like some kind of b-movie experience enhancement craze of the 1950s.

    CueCat

    CueCat plugged into your PC (Windows only if you please) and allowed you to scan bar codes of magazines into your computer to get further information or content. This idea seems to have caught on in Japan with mobile phones and specialised software, so maybe they were too visionary?

    3Com Audrey

    The 3Com Audrey internet appliance was a great well engineered device killed by the ever decreasing price of PCs. I still rate its QNX-based OS and I like the product design on it.

    PointCast

    PointCast the push technology service that was a richer more engaging experience than RSS is today, but then I was sat at the end of a fat pipe whereas most users were on dial-up. Also marketers knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing used the service to carpet-bomb users with unwanted ads.

    Tech trends

    Tim Hanrahan’s piece on Tech’s 10-year Creep (May 8, 2006) brings out some interesting trends that have occurred. I have paraphrased and commented on his trends below

    Anytime, Anywhere: Push email and wireless internet access mean that getting online whilst traveling or wire-free on your couch or at Starbucks — is possible for $60 a month or so. However it eats into the work life balance.

    Think Better! Google basically.

    Putting Yourself Out There: Originally people liked their privacy, caller ID on phones was pushing the envelope in terms of social disclosure. Over the past five years people have gotten used to sharing personal information online. Chat rooms, forums, online dating followed by social-networking sites; to blogs and MySpace came to dominate. Easy-to-use tools, cheap to free storage and online social interaction brought out the pioneer spirit ‘Go web young man‘.

    The Post-Stuff World: Music downloads, ebooks, ripped movies. (But if its that post-stuff why is Amazon so successful selling books, everyone’s iPod is full of music ripped from CDs and people love their laptops, mobile phones, PDAs, crackberries, Nintendo and Sony handhelds). This techno-minimalism bollox didn’t wash with me.

    Free Information, Free People: People are exercising their free speech and there is a maelstrom of content out there that Technorati struggles to handle. The social web has replaced the techno web – (though when Soledad O’Brien hosted a show on MSNBC that featured a young Max Headroom-type avatar sidekick named Dev ten years ago (good gosh, was it that long ago?) was it precient of Second Life?) CNN now covers blog content as if it was matter-of-fact, though blogs often don’t have the same rigorous process behind them as well-written journalism.

    Picture of Soledad O’Brien courtesy of CNN.com. More related posts here.

  • Veoh and misc. tech stuff

    Veoh Networks is a great company, though I haven’t worked out yet whether it is sailing too close to the wind or not. The company is funded by media conglomerate Time-Warner and Michael Eisner (the former ruler of planet Disney). The website looks like YouTube, but with some important differences:

    • Veoh lets you submit full-sized streaming videos
    • YouTube limits its users to 100 MB files.
    • Veoh can do 2 GB files distributed via a P2P-client available for Mac and that other platform

    I’ve been enjoying a selection of ‘so-bad-they’re-good’ 1970s martial arts movies off there. The Mac client is really easy to use. My main concern is how will the company make money in the longer term. I can see someone like TimeWarner using Veoh as a guinea pig to further is experiment with AOL and online TV. On second thoughts just enjoy it while you can! More media related posts here.


    I’m with Stupid    Apple has apparently moved away from using a PortalPlayer media processor in all its iPods and instead moved to Samsung for the next-generation of MP3 players. PortalPlayer is very exposed to the Apple business, with iPods counting for about 70 per cent of its sales according to a Reuters report that I’ve read. Its not healthy for PortalPlayer, hopefully the company will diversify its client base to become more independent.

    However Samsung as a supplier was also a dumb move for Apple. This is not a commodity product like flash memory where Apple can use multiplie suppliers and change at will, the media chip is central to the iPod functionality and experience.

    Does it sound like a smart move to work closely with (and educate in the art of engineering a killer MP3 player) a large ambitious, hyper-aggressive company that wants to eat Apple for lunch? It has been alleged that Samsung had meetings with creative agencies in London where the central theme was Kill iPod.

    You can chart the fall of the iPod empire from this moment on…

  • Day pass media model

    I first came across the day pass concept with Salon.com, its an interesting compromise between subscription content and ‘free content’. First of all, with the possible exception of consumer homepages there’s little free content on the web. Content that you don’t have to pay for has advertisements around the sides of the pages and in the text, these are often paid for on a ‘per click’ basis.

    Self described ‘premium’ publications like the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal go for a walled-garden approach where you have a paid for subscription and they vend the content out.

    I consider this to be going after short-term gains and sacrificing their future.

    The day pass says my content is valuable; however if you engage with my sponsor, they will pay for your access to my content over the next 24-hours. It means I have a moral contract with them to listen to their sponsor (and actually Aviva the insurance company did a smart bit of work by tailoring their content to deliver their message to an Economist reader whilst at the same time getting over their positioning as a progressive innovative company), I understand the ‘real value’ of the content that I get to look at AND the publisher remains relevant to a modern net audience rather than trapped in the dead forest business.

    As Oscar Wilde said it is better to be talked about than not be talked about; in the online world, getting talked about means that you have to be accessible. Bloggers will tend not to blog about sites were people cannot go and see the content in context, for instance I have reduced the number of links I have to New York Times stories because of their part-way subscription model.

    During my day pass tour of the Economist, I came across a series of trend articles and a number of interesting podcasts for download touching on some of the editorial teams hot topics for 2005: economic change

    More related content here.

  • Chinese eyes on Korea

    From romantic Korean drams to hard boiled films like Old Boy and Silmido are making waves amongst arthouse cinema fans and movie industry talent-spotters throughout the western world. It now seems that its not only Hollywood that is turning its eyes eastwards to follow the latest cultural carrying-ons in Korea, but Chinese eyes are too.

    The New York Times China’s Youth Look to Seoul for Inspiration by Norimitsu Onishi (January 2, 2006) has an interesting article on how young Chinese eyes Korea as tastemakers in fashion, beauty and  popular culture.

    The country’s cultural exports are cutting-edge tempered with the Confucian-based culture familiar to Chinese audiences. American culture is too ‘post-modern’ to be absorbed directly. At least some of the time, China sees Japan in a way reminiscent of Basil Fawlty and  is still beyond the pale because of the War. Although the Chinese consistent appetite for Japanese AV content is well documented elsewhere. Taste making goes beyond pop singers and movies to hip brands such the must-have mobile phone from Samsung and Hyundai cars.

    Rather like Eric Clapton adapting the blues for white audiences in the UK; so Korea is adapting western idioms from hip-hop culture and sit-coms like Sex in the City. It is then making them palatable for East Asian audiences. Free trade and intellectual property protection is likely to not be as beneficial to Hollywood in tapping the Chinese market as the media moguls had hoped. More Korea related posts here.

  • That was 2005

    January 2005

    Bez won Celebrity Big Brother, ten years after the peak of the Happy Mondays. London creative team Lee and Dan made an Al Qeada inspired calling card for Volkswagen that managed to leak out on to the web. Analysts at Credit Suisse First Boston won the monthly award for stating the bleeding obvious. We did a bit of homegrown analysis with the help of information from Popbitch to work out just how much News International made from the Prince Harry Nazi pictures. We also found that the Watchman character that the rc personality most resembled was The Comedian, more details on testing your Watchman Personality Inventory here.

    February 2005

    Words of the month were Mum Truck and KAGOY (kids get older, younger). Hunter S Thompson killed himself and half the media world pretended that they were avid readers of his work. The books of the month were Michael Collins by Tim Pat Coogan and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (another pioneer of the gonzo school of journalism). The US Army released details around its successful word-of-mouth marketing campaign to attract recruits. America’s Army a realistic 3D game garnered interest in soldiering as a career and was far more fruitful than their television advertising campaigns. Bob Cringely highlighted how 25 billion USD needed to be invested by VC funds in the next 18 months or else they would lose their management fees. This of course wouldn’t have anything to do with the bubbling up of Web 2.0 would it? Carly Fiorina was finally ousted from H-P much to the relief of its employees. Sci-Fi London hosted a fantastic all-nighter of Shaw Brothers classics including Super Infra Man and Monkey Goes West.

    March 2005

    renaissance chambara turned 1 years-old. Forrester mapped out trends in consumer electronics for 2005. March’s word was Search Arbitrage. Seymour Hersh highlighted the Pentagon’s plans for axis-of-evil club member Iran. Hersh’s pioneering journalistic approach contrasted with general media malaise. The Sony PSP picked up a lot of interest on the web with some hailing it as the new iPod, I don’t think so…. And most importantly the rc towers local pub got recognised as Pub of the Year by the Evening Standard.

    April 2005

    PR gossip blog Spin Bunny was shut down for the first time as an unnamed PR agency called in the lawyers. Red Bull’s Art of Can exhibition brought a bit of culture to the Truman brewery. Word of the month is Kronenbourg. H-P manages to launch survey results that make them look foolish. There was less content overall as we were burning the midnight candle at work.

    May 2005

    Flying Records, one of the UK’s foremost dance record shops finally closed its shutters after ten years at the forefront of the scene, however its spirit lives on as Andrew Baker now champions new tracks online working for distributor Goya Music. Palm launched the LifeDrive and it didn’t look that impressive compared to an iPod, retail therapy was thus avoided. Michelle Delio was found to have made up some of her stories that she contributed to Wired News. The word of the month was Sachet Marketing.

    June 2005

    Country Music Television appoints a vice president of Dukes of Hazzard in a brilliantly executed PR campaign to promotes its re-runs of the original series. Omega releases its Planet Ocean watch – the watch that the Seamaster should be. WTF Apple goes Intel! Web 2.0 starts looking bubblicious. It was a few months since the Miami Winter Music festival and the Ibiza season was just starting to kick-off so a bumper month was had in the vinyl stakes. Michael Jackson is found not guilty, but the court of public opinion isn’t so sure. The word of the month is Mommy Consultant, Burson-Marsteller’s phrase e-fluential missed out because it was too close to effluent and we wouldn’t want you to be under the opinion that we thought all bloggers were full of sh!t now would we?

    July 2005

    Cracks start to show in the eBay edifice. Fatigue for consumerism starts to set in. Coke rolls out their Love poster campaign, arguably the best piece of creative this year. The ongoing rising price of oil gives Hubbert’s Peak a mainstream audience as consumers wake up to the fact that oil isn’t going to get any cheaper or more plentiful. The New York Times celebrated the tenth birthday of e-commerce.

    August 2005

    Wired issues its ten-year netrospective ‘celebrating’ the original of the bubble with the Netscape IPO. Citizen journalism sees its first cynical cash in with the launch of Scoopt, a picture agency for the general public and their camera phone. Paparazzi sleep easy though. Music industry bodies blame everybody but themselves for the continued under-performance of their industry. Bob Cringely launches his NerdTV series of interviews and Stussy’s 25th (XXV) anniversary collection is full swing. Towards the end of the month I managed to survive Silicon Valley. In Utah, the heavy mob is used to deal with kids listening to repetitive beats in an incident rather like the infamous police raid in Nelson near Blackburn back in the day. I am sure American’s everywhere feel safer already. The harvest of quality dance music on an acid house tip.

    September 2005

    Chigger is the word. Nick Love’s film The Business reminds us why the 1980s were so good and so crap at the same time. Palm previews a Windows device, Dell stumbles and I try hard not to snigger, its especially hard when some bright spark calls Dell’s answer to the iPod Shuffle the Dell Ditty and styles it like a Ronson lighter. Apple launches the iPod Nano and gadgeteers recoil in horror from the Motorola ROKR. Nestle re-releases the Texan bar. Geek-in-chief at Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz, appeals to the troops to stop leaking confidential news via their blogs; via a blog!

    October 2005

    Designers Burro shut up shop, while Criminal opens a Covent Garden boutique and Matmos see sense and re-release the Telstar lamp. Disgraced analyst Harry Blodgett starts his own blog. Super Southerner is the phrase of the moment. Spin Bunny gets shut down for the second time, this time it looks like its permanent as the entire site is removed from Typepad, speculation is that a South Bank based agency was responsible for letting loose the dogs of law. The tune of the moment is Tiger Stripes – Spirited Away. In a pre-Halloween push Burger King’s clumsy viral marketing efforts get unmasked by Slate.

    November 2005

    Lynx launches a bespoke perfume in conjunction with Oki-Ni, research shows that music downloads have plateaued proving the proving the point that you can only buy so much crap. Talking of crap, Hypercolour looks like it may be making a come back. AOL makes its first interesting move in years by taking TV to the web and my even have a good business model. The word is Shorty (at least according to DJ Tim Westwood).

    December 2005

    Christmas comes in with a whimper and Sony messes up a street marketing campaign for the PSP. rc floats the concept of a media bond and futures market to capitalise on the digitisation of content, the long tail and too much sloshing around waiting to be invested. Bootlegs mixes of Aretha Franklin and Pink Floyd move the feet so that the mind will follow. The word of the month is Uncanny Valley. Designers Terratag have some awesome gear in their latest fashion collection. Amazon take a Hermann Goring approach to email marketing in the final run-up to Christmas. A brief trip to Ireland left me with a number of contradictory observations about the state of the Celtic Tiger.

    Image courtesy of Sanrio. More related content here.