Adbusters : The Magazine – #71 Beginnings of Sorrow / Generation F*cked: How Britain is Eating Its Young

On the whole, British children were more disconnected from their families, with nearly half of 15-year-old boys spending most nights out with friends, compared to just 17 percent of their French counterparts. Forty percent of UK youth had sex before age 15, compared with 15 percent of Polish teens. They drank nearly four times as much as the Italians, and, perhaps most saliently, had the lowest sense of subjective well-being among all the youth surveyed.

Noting that many UK-born Muslim children feel culturally distinct from both the inward-looking attitudes of their immigrant parents, and from established religious communities that “fail to recognise and relate to the challenges facing the youth,” she argued that the turn toward extremism is all too easy when “issues such as lack of integration, identity crises and their roles in this society” are left to children to decipher by themselves.

Well worth reading today. Although we may not have the violence, we have here ourselves a burgeoning case of social stratification and consumerist despair. The article states most UK youth are statistically unable to afford a house of their own (and start their families) until the age of 34. Hey, that sounds familiar. [via pumpkineyes]

As if this weren’t funny enough, the English “lyrics” subtitled underneath send it over the edge!

Long pointless post ahead.

This is the text that comes with it, and since I refuse to sign up for facebook, this blog is where I’m gonna dump it.

SUPPOSEDLY if you’ve seen over 85 films, you have no life. Mark the ones you’ve seen. There are 239 films on this list. Copy this list, go to your own facebook account, paste this as a note. Then, put x’s next to the films you’ve seen, add them up, change the header adding your number, and click post at the bottom. Have fun.

I’ve moved it (and myself) to Facebook!

This is Allison Stokke, high-school polevault champion, and new face of Sports Hotness. The story of her ‘unwelcome’ status as an “internet sex symbol” has now hit the mainstream media. And here.

Link to more high-res photos over at WithLeather.com.

What you see above is a QR-Code (Quick Response), ubiquitous anywhere in Japan, and on merchandise produced in Japan. Although the technology’s use license is ambiguous (to me), and there’s a chance some corporation ‘owns’ it in some nefarious way or another, so far in practice QR-Codes have been easy, open, and free barcodes for public use.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a mobile phone in Japan that doesn’t read QR-Codes, and they can contain anything from plain text, email addresses, phone numbers, or links to online content. They’ve been deployed for years and allow consumers to access extra content, interact with companies, and exchange information quickly. Anyone can make a QR-Code, and I’m told you can find them on a great deal of business cards. One quick scan, and contact details make their way into your phone, hassle-free.

Locally, StarHub licensed NTT’s cellphone web platform, i-mode. The success of that endeavor aside, I’ve always believed QR-Codes should make their way here as well. Why then, is Singapore being plastered with THESE?!

ColorCodes are a competing technology that depend on color reproduction to work. I won’t go into detail because you can read ColorZip’s website for yourself, but this implementation is chiefly used to deliver simple URLs to online content. Developed in Korea, maintained by a company called ColorZip SEA, and endorsed here by Singapore Press Holdings, this technology is a shadow of what QR-Code is. Is it a competing standard for the sake of having one of our own? Is it an effort to push more expensive color pages (in SPH’s newspapers) to advertisers? Who knows.

The one advantage ColorCodes have, are that they can be read by almost any crap digital camera. Unless you’re in an environment with strong colored light. QR-Codes generally need to be printed larger than an inch, unless you have a cameraphone that takes close-up shots. In Japan, that’s almost every phone. The argument for ColorCodes falls apart when you realize that these low-tech cameraphones need web-browsers and internet connections in order to see the content that the ColorCodes reference.

The system is closed and proprietary, and I’ve found no way to create one of my own. Everything goes through ColorZip SEA, and I think that’s just the way they like it. They’ve started a MySpace wannabe called ColorZipMe.com, where you can make an ugly profile page for yourself, that comes with a ColorCode link to itself. Wanna make a ColorCode for the blog you’ve already got? Doesn’t look like you can.

So why, just why, are ColorCodes being pushed as our nation’s standard for cameraphone barcodes? The rationale for even having such a technology is because advanced mobile-data-plan-consuming nations like Japan have them. Because they push the population to become more tech-savvy, and marketing to be more effective. That’s why we have free island-wide WiFi.

So why are we choosing a product built for compatibility with 20th century cameraphones? Shouldn’t we just bite the bullet, adopt the superior technology, and wait for our middle-aged to renew their carrier contracts, and get better phones? This must be the first “groundbreaking” technology I’ve seen to target the lowest-common denominator as its early adopter. For shame!

In the unlikely event that you are as upset about this as I am, and I know there’s got to be at least one of you, here’s what you can do in juvenile rebellion:

1.
Download a QR-Code reader for your non-Japanese phone. I’ve been using Kaywa Reader. It’s a Java app, and you can download it by visiting reader.kaywa.com with your mobile phone.

2.
Start making QR-Codes and put them on your business cards, blogs, flyers, posters, etc. You can make them here, or download a Windows app from the NTT DoCoMo site. A list of other apps resides here.

The blogger, Robert Peloschek, uses QR-Codes as supplementary permalinks for each post. He also has some interesting stories about the technology, including a new application for it, in motion images. They call it “Movie QR”. Here’s a promotional ad for it that’s quite funny.

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