Vintage health movie about good posture. Check out Sally Draper in the white dress at 6:45. Spooky!!!
From the Prelinger Archive, via the Atlantic
BBC NEWS - TOP PIRATED ARTISTS AROUND THE WORLD
data from Musicmetric, more specific UK sharing data available at BBC News
I didn’t know that this site existed until I got a banner ad for it. I’m fascinated that it’s been around since 2004 and I’m just finding out about it now, that for once a banner ad actually worked on me, and at the niche genius of the concept. I’m also feeling kind of insecure now that the internet thinks that I’m a good candidate for the site.
INFORMALITY IN FRENCH SOCIAL MEDIA
BBC News reports on the informality of social media communication in France. Tu is used almost universally, with the formal vous being discarded on platforms such as Twitter.
This is perhaps an example of language being reengineered to be good enough, a phenomenon given a good overview in this 2009 Wired article. While standard forms of Romance languages give us precise ways of addressing others, formal and informal, singular and plural, the English you offers the simplicity of a single solution. Tu in this case is good enough for the abbreviated confines of a tweet.
However, the picture is complicated by the lack of clear rules for communicating in these formats. Laurent Joffrin, editor of Nouvel Observateur, on the controversy surrounding his insistence of maintaining the standard French usage of tu and vous:
“It was unpleasant,” he says of that episode. “There’s a group of people who think they are superior because they know a way of talking [on Twitter] that others don’t. I don’t like the hierarchy. They want to impose their codes.”
This is just one aspect of a larger attitude of stealth-snobbery that can be seen across the tech world. The affected informality of Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie and jeans wardrobe is the most prominent example of this attitude.
But how has usage in social media been shifting in other languages?
- In German there’s a tendency to use the informal “du” rather than the formal “Sie” on social media
- In Russian the formal “vy” remains standard between strangers online
- Language is liable to be even more formal than in face-to-face contact on the Japanese social networking site, Mixi
- The informal “to” is more common than the formal “shoma” on social networks in Persian
- The formal “nin” is rarely used in Chinese anyway but online language is often very informal and has generated a new lexicon of web slang
- In the UK emails are now far more likely to begin with “Hi” than letters were in the era of snail mail
the takeaway: shorter is better, or at least good enough
TOURISM INDUSTRY SWALLOWS SELF IN AMSTERDAM, CITY IMPLODES
augurs doom for highly visited metropolitan areas worldwide
