In doing some online research recently, I ran across an article in Business Week (Oct. 12, 2009) that exhorts those who don’t “get” Twitter, Facebook or BlackBerrys to “relax.” The article cites Dennis Baron, an English and linguistics professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who has written a new book A Better Pencil: Writers and […]
Deep Reading
I continue to think about the notion that “As Technology Advances, Deep Reading Suffers” that Nicholas Carr explores in his June 20, 2010, article in the San Francisco Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2010/06/20/INL91DU44K.DTL You see, according to recent studies, the average American spends more than eight hours a day peering at a screen, but only 20 minutes reading books […]
The Space
Here’s a little factoid for you. Word spaces (or the spaces between the words) were invented in the Middle Ages. Before then, people didn’t separate one word from the next. As Nicholas Carr explains in his June 20, 2010, article “As Technology Advances, Deep Reading Suffers” in the San Francisco Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2010/06/20/INL91DU44K.DTL): “Long lines of […]
Internet Spells Death of English
I recently read an article entitled “Internet Spells the End of English” http://bit.ly/6khLsu Given that title, I assumed that the article would rail about how texting, phonetic spellings and the like were destroying English communication. Instead, the headline writer had cleverly (if obtusely) hinted at the real topic of the article: how the Internet is […]
Vocus “State of the Media 2010”: Television
Here is my third report about the Vocus “State of the Media 2010” webinar (http://tinyurl.com/ybglakz) and accompanying white paper. (http://www.vocus.com/state-of-the-media/index.asp). This report focuses on television. I have already reported on print (newspapers and magazines) and will report on radio next. In 2009, 100 stations were affected by bankruptcies. These were mainly Chapter 11 reorganizations, brought […]
