Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, in an interview with Der Spiegel:
I don’t use the word journalism.
Then…
Sorry, I don’t use the word media. I don’t use the word news. I don’t think that those words mean anything anymore.
Followed shortly by…
There are no other words. We’re in one of those strange eras where the words of the last century don’t have meaning.
The Panel on Fair Access to the Professions has released its final report, Unleashing Aspiration. One of its central arguments (which, alarmingly, seems to have been in place since before the panel was set up), is that ‘social mobility into professional careers has slowed’, and that ‘if action is not taken to reverse historical trends, tomorrow’s generation of professionals will today grow up in families that are better off than seven in ten of all families in the UK’. These arguments, and the evidence behind them, are laid out in Chapter 1 of the report. However, some of the reasoning is distinctly questionable.
The eMarketer website has published the findings of a study it commissioned from Lightspeed Research on mobile phone use in the US, UK, France and Germany.
For the UK, it’s no surprise that texting and voice calls are the most common types of use (82% and 75% at least once a week, respectively), though as eMarketing points out the figure of 22% that browse the internet weekly is a surprise. This seems to me to reflect a change in thinking about what mobile devices are for that has been going on for a few years now, and is most clearly seen in convergent devices like the iPhone and Blackberry.
The National Pandemic Flu Service is due to be launched this week. Essentially it’s a phone line and website which tells people if they have swine flu and, if they do, directs them to treatment.
Apparently having one phone line that you can call to ask questions about your health, as well as a nationwide primary care system, isn’t enough, and we need something else as well. I especially love the indignant tone from the Lib Dems’ health spokesman, Norman Lamb, complaining about the ‘additional burden’ on GPs of ‘a large number of calls’, as if he can’t believe that people are so stupid as to be phoning up their GPs when they feel ill. I mean, next they’ll be onto the police just because they’ve been stabbed.
I couldn’t resist that subject line, but there’s a point to it.
The blurred, grainy photo in this post (taken with my slightly ropy phone camera) is of a customer comments card I found this weekend in the Cambridge branch of Pret, the sandwich shop. The card reads:
My name is Marcus. I’m the Manager at this Pret shop.
Looking for crime statistics the other day, I came across an article
from the Evening Standard in 2007, whose headline told
me:
Average age of murdered teenagers is just 16
Given that we’re talking about people who aged between 13 and 19, you
wonder what the authors of the piece thought their average age might
be.
And, as if to labour the point, we later find out…