Entries Tagged as 'cross-cultural communication'

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

How To Stand In the Face of Powerlessness For A New Generation

The ‘Source’ in the Distance
Last week, my friend Kris Krug flew down to the Gulf of Mexico on the TEDxOilSpill Expedition, a week-long project to document the crisis in the Gulf and bring a first hand report back to the TEDxOilSpill event in Washington, D.C. on June 28. Kris, a photographer, web strategist, and self-described “cyberpunk anti-hero [...]

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Microsoft gets aKin to Circus

While everyone else is busy speculating about the potential significance of Microsoft’s new mobile contender, the Kin, I just discovered last night that I am much more interested in the content of their new ads, namely Portland’s March Fourth Marching Band, who’ve been repping it for the Northwest Contingent of the 1-5 Circus Scene since [...]

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Don’t blame me. I’m from — wait… what?

Last night, in a special election to replace the late Senator, Ted Kennedy, my home state of Massachusetts elected its first Republican to the senate since 1978, Scott Brown.
Massachusetts has never elected a Republican senator during my lifetime. I’ve never known anything but Democrats (except for one Governor, once), from my home state my ENTIRE [...]

Friday, January 15th, 2010

The Cyberpunk Future of… Now

The 7.0 peak from the Haiti earthquake indicated by a seismic analyst at the Caltech Seismological Laboratory. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

On Tuesday, January 12, I went into a meeting at 3:00pm PST, and when I came out, about an hour and a half later I quickly discovered that something had happened in Haiti during those 90 [...]

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Make More *UN*social Web Applications

Do you like Reggaeton?
This was a question an old friend asked me while visiting in L.A. We’re both from Boston, where most people have never heard of Reggaeton. And I hadn’t either, until I moved to Southern California.
If you don’t know what Reggaeton is, it’s:
A form of urban music that became popular with Latin American [...]

Monday, June 29th, 2009

The Right to Empathy

Oh boy.
This is not typically the kind of stuff I write about here, but it is something I feel quite strongly about, and, if nothing else, it makes for a case study in cross-cultural communication — not to mention some interesting neuroscience.
Last week, as the New York Times reported, French President Nicolas Sarkozy addressed the [...]

Monday, June 8th, 2009

Your Lifestyle Is An Alternate Reality Game

I had already joined the Circus scene when, in early 2006, I was consulting at Wong Doody and heard about a clothing company client they were working with called Edoc Laundry. The clothes had an intriguing concept: there were secret codes in the garments, which, if deciphered, would reveal clues to a mystery story. The wearers of Edoc [...]

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

today’s awesome ad award goes to:

I noticed this last night in a window of a corner store in my neighborhood and thought it was great. I’m not a native Spanish speaker but English wasn’t my first language either, so I understand what the message means beyond simply understanding what the words mean.
If you don’t know Spanish, what “Te extrano” is [...]

Monday, May 11th, 2009

boldly going where…. culture would eventually follow

It first occurred to me as I was watching the trailer for Star Trek: First Contact, back in March. The cast seemed so typical of the racial and ethnic diversity reflected in the TV shows we’ve all been watching for years, like Lost…

and Heroes…

It seemed completely natural for 2009, and yet what occurred to me [...]

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Google bless you!

Just a quick post to let you know our new Google overlords must have officially arrived, according to this ad:

Taking over from the exiting party which has heretofore been responsible for bestowing the bless-age, and to whom all unanswered questions had previously been directed, the new ephemeral, universal, entity that apparently has $5,000-a-month jobs for [...]