The evolution of reading

The University of California at San Diego’s 2009 How Much Information? report estimates Americans’ total leisure-time consumption of information (measured in hours, words and bytes – see the report’s methodology), based on existing household panel, census and survey data. One of the headlines making the news (see here, for example) is the estimate that since 1960 reading as a way of receiving information has grown in proportion and absolute volume. As the report puts it: Read the rest of this entry »

Sausages and statuses

Two of today’s lighter news stories in the Telegraph turn on matters of language; both are slightly questionable.

The first is the bizarre, wonderful story of the man in Benxi, China who tried to convince a restaurant full of diners that he was a suicide bomber by going in with sausages strapped to his torso. A quote, attributed to one of the police officers attending the scene, is given:

It must have been terrifying for the customers but those things would only have gone off if you’d kept them past their sell by date.

Read the rest of this entry »

Rage Against Social Media

Let’s start with the details before the analysis makes them pointless. On 20 December 2009 the winner in the annual competition for the UK Christmas Number One music single was announced. It was, rather unexpectedly, `Killing In The Name‘ by Rage Against the Machine, a rap metal classic from 1992. The secret of the single’s sudden festive success was a campaign on the social networking site Facebook. The ‘Rage Against The Machine For Christmas No. 1‘ group, started by Jon and Tracy Morter, attracted over 960,000 members. Its aim was not just to get `Killing In The Name’ to the Christmas Number One spot. It was to prevent that spot from being taken, for the fifth year in a row, by the winner of the X Factor reality TV talent competition. This year’s winner, `The Climb’ by Joe McElderry, was relegated to Number Two. As far as anyone can tell, this chart result has been driven exclusively by the hype generated around this Facebook campaign.

Read the rest of this entry »

From semantic webs to thesaurus worlds

I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking (not blogging) about context-dependent search and location-based digital services of the Layar variety, and in particular what they mean for brands and consumers. There’s too much to go into, but on the one hand there is enormous potential to improve opportunities for that most enjoyable of activities, random discovery; and on the other, there is the rather tiresome effect of putting another layer of intermediation between people and the world around them, even as we keep praising the disintermediating effects of the social web.

Read the rest of this entry »

Climate and other gates

There can be something a bit precocious and annoying about new words, can’t there? There’s also no shortage of them: it seems to be a sport among journalists and tech people, in particular, to come up with new coinages. Few of them stick.

In my post on heatist, though, I made the point that new words, even if they don’t last, can tell us a lot about the attitudes of the people who coined them. One way of finding those attitudes is to look for meaningful similarities to existing words. Linguists call these groupings of similar words classes. Classes may group words by their forms (often called lexical or morphological classes): words ending in -ing, for example, or words than pluralize in -en (e.g. ox, child). They may also group words by their functions: the parts of speech are classes. They may even group words by their meanings: thesauruses are lists of quite tightly-defined semantic classes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posting lions to Twitter

I worked this out the other day, and it made me smile.

If you were to take all the text posted to Twitter in a single hour at a peak time of day (around 1.5 million messages, according to Tweespeed at the time of looking), and print it out on normal 80gsm paper, single-sided, single-spaced in 12pt Courier New, that hour’s worth of Twittering would weigh around 250kg.

Which is roughly the weight of a lion. Quite a large one.

Suddenly Twitter’s bird logo looks a bit out of place.

A note on ‘heatist’

Andrew Gilligan’s Telegraph piece on some of the operating costs of putting on the Copenhagen climate summit introduced me to a new word in its description of the climate protests taking place in the city.

In the city’s famous anarchist commune of Christiania this morning, among the hash dealers and heavily-graffitied walls, they started their two-week “Climate Bottom Meeting,” complete with a “storytelling yurt” and a “funeral of the day” for various corrupt, “heatist” concepts such as “economic growth”.

Read the rest of this entry »

How dead is everything?

Taking my cue from Richard’s post, I thought it would be fun to see the extent to which the blogosphere (as read by Blogpulse) has decided that things are dead over the last six months.

A warning first: like most untagged corpus searches, this probably returns quite a lot of noise, especially since Blogpulse tends to ignore stopwords. So don’t take it as gospel.

Let’s look at how dead email, print and Twitter have been recently. This search looks for the form ‘[medium] is dead’ (which means ‘[medium] [any stopword] dead’ to Blogpulse).

Read the rest of this entry »

Turn down the noise, turn up the silence

Sathnam Sanghera argues in the Times today that ‘email is no longer a useful method of communication’. His reasons are, in short, that there is too much of it (the ‘victim of its own success’ argument), and that social networking sites ‘allow you to message lots of people at the same time much more efficiently than e-mail’ (and eliminate the need for some kinds of email) and ‘encourage brevity of communication’.

The evidence for the death of email is presented as follows:

It is true, of course, that e-mail is still growing: according to a recent study, in the month of August this year, the number of e-mail users increased by 21 per cent. But social networking is growing faster: over the same period, the number of social network users grew by 31 per cent.

Read the rest of this entry »