In a recent conversation, she explained that wired and wireless connections, building blocks of modern life, are now essentially controlled by four companies. Comcast and Time Warner have a complete lock on broadband in the markets they control, covering some 50 million American homes, while Verizon and AT&T own 64 percent of cellphone service. Don’t get her started on the Comcast-NBCUniversal merger unless you have some time on your hands.

Telecom’s Big Players Hold Back the Future - NYTimes.com

Humphreys said one of the early conclusions from her research is the possibility that the mass media of the 20th century was in fact a blip, a historical aberration, and that, through platforms like Twitter, we are gradually returning to a communication network that indulges, without guilt, the individual’s desire to record his existence.

Back to the future: What if the ‘mass media’ era was just an accident of history?  (via courtenaybird)

(via courtenaybird)

It’s not just e-mails. Unreturned phone calls, texts and messages via social media can be just as irritating. But I’m going to concentrate on e-mails because for most people (teenage sons excepted), they are the most common tool of business and personal communication. A large part of the problem, said Terri Kurtzberg, an associate professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School, is that in face-to-face or phone conversations, “it’s clear how long a silence should last before you need to respond,” she said. “There’s no norm with digital communication.

The Anxiety of the Unanswered E-Mail - NYTimes.com

As many as half of the world’s 7,000 languages are expected to be extinct by the end of this century; it is estimated that one language dies out every 14 days.

Dying languages: scientists fret as one disappears every 14 days | Toronto Star (via slantback)

(via slantback)

S.E.C. Sets Rules for Disclosures Using Social Media

Chief executives can now feel free to post, blog or tweet — as long as they inform investors about their social media strategy first.

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday outlined new disclosure rules that clarify how companies can use Facebook, Twitter and other social networks to disseminate information provided they meet certain requirements. Still, the new move may reduce spontaneity because companies may limit their communications to official corporate accounts and file the information with the agency at the same time.

With the decision, the S.E.C is playing catch-up to the new era of social media.

» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)

I have decreasing amounts of tolerance for unnecessary communication because it is a burden and a cost,” said Baratunde Thurston, co-founder of Cultivated Wit, a comedic creative company. “It’s almost too easy to not think before we express ourselves because expression is so cheap, yet it often costs the receiver more.

Etiquette Redefined in the Digital Age - NYTimes.com

Texting Isn't Writing, It's Fingered Speech

All the handwringing by 7th-grade English teachers and parents over the tens of millions of grammatically challenged texts sent every day misses the point of what texting is, says John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University. “Texting isn’t written language,” McWhorter told the audience at TED2013. “It much more closely resembles the kind of language we’ve had for so many more years: spoken language.”

Speech is the way we humans have communicated for about 150,000 years. Writing, while a useful artifice, is a relatively new invention. “If humanity has existed for 24 hours, writing came about at 11:07 p.m.,” McWhorter says.

» via Wired

How human language could have evolved from birdsong

“The sounds uttered by birds offer in several respects the nearest analogy to language,” Charles Darwin wrote in “The Descent of Man” (1871), while contemplating how humans learned to speak. Language, he speculated, might have had its origins in singing, which “might have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions.”

Now researchers from MIT, along with a scholar from the University of Tokyo, say that Darwin was on the right path. The balance of evidence, they believe, suggests that human language is a grafting of two communication forms found elsewhere in the animal kingdom: first, the elaborate songs of birds, and second, the more utilitarian, information-bearing types of expression seen in a diversity of other animals.

» via MIT

Manx: Bringing a language back from the dead

Condemned as a dead language, Manx - the native language of the Isle of Man - is staging an extraordinary renaissance, writes Rob Crossan.

Road signs, radio shows, mobile phone apps, novels - take a drive around the Isle of Man today and the local language is prominent.

But just 50 years ago Manx seemed to be on the point of extinction.

» via BBC

Instead of dinner-and-a-movie, which seems as obsolete as a rotary phone, they rendezvous over phone texts, Facebook posts, instant messages and other “non-dates” that are leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend.

The End of Courtship? - NYTimes.com