Review of Blogs from apennings.com June 2010

The Meaning-Makers: WPP
This is my second post for The Meaning-Makers series. The first discussed advertising behemoth, Omnicom, one of the top four global holding companies in the advertising, PR, and media buying field along with the Interpublic Group and the Publicis Groupe. This industry continues to be dominated by 4 major holding companies and the case can be made that have significant power over the production of meaning in our world.

How IT Came to Rule the World, 2.3: Data Packets for Dollars
Using the new X.25 series of packet-switching protocols embraced by the ITU, banks developed extensive international networks and clearinghouse systems to offer information services for the movement of credit information and money and to settle accounts. The supranational fund of electronic eurodollars that emerged out of the OPEC surpluses of the 1970s’ oil crises an provided an important step to the global Internet as the packet-switched technology was implemented in banking networks to coordinate the resultant flows of international currency exchange and debt.

How IT Came to Rule the World, 2.2: Eurodollars, Petrodollars
How did this world of global digital monetarism emerge? How did fluid capital transcend the containment policies and boundaries erected in the period up to 1970s to develop in the 1980s and beyond into a global financial environment where computerized algorithmic trading have created complex high transactional volume markets for an array of currency derivatives, stock index futures, CDOs and other computer based financial instruments?

The Move to “Smart TV”
OK, so the term “Smart TV” is an oxymoron. Still, something is afoot here with Google, and to a lesser extent Apple (not to be underestimated) getting into the mix for the creation of a post-network television environment. I’m teaching a New Technologies in Advertising and Public Relations course this summer at NYU and we got a gift on the first day of class when Google announced a cooperative agreement with Sony Television, Intel, and Logitech to produce a new viewing (and advertising) experience called Google TV.

iPhone vs Android?
We’ve been hearing a lot about competition between Apple and Google over the Smartphone. These statistics add some perspective, although they don’t add the trend lines. One trend line of course is that mobile penetration is still increasing. Another is that Android, Google’s new operating system for smart phones such as Motorola’s Droid and HTC’s [...]

The Meaning Makers: Omnicom
Who produces the meaning in our media-saturated society? I don’t have an easy answer to this question but I’m starting a new series called the Meaning Makers, that explores the companies, people and practices engaged in the production of our culture(s) desires, and mentalities.

Meanings that Mean Something
One of the things they did was to try to identify commonalities in the types of meaning people value by interviewing people from different cultures and countries.