The decline of the book

… in the age of resources on the web. Today’s Zits:

Well, there have been Cliff’s Notes around for some time — but they are books, with pages. Just not many pages.

 

Autocorrect rules

Today’s Rhymes With Orange:

Here’s a particularly silly version of autocorrect — or possibly automatic completion software —  one that replaces frequent words (party, jacket) by infrequent ones (partake, jackal), indeed infrequent words that don’t fit the context (partake is a verb, while the context calls for a noun; and suit jacket is a common collocation, while suit jackal is absurd).

 

More on modern communications

Today’s Zits:

The latest in a series of strips depicting young people as rejecting the telephone and face-to-face interaction in favor of modern communications technology.

As a bonus, though this isn’t hot news, there’s the verbing of the noun Facebook. Plenty of examples around, for instance this one:

Honoring those who Facebooked themselves out of their jobs

The Facebook Fired blog is a painfully modern collection of stories memorializing those who are collecting unemployment thanks to posts on Facebook or similar public disclosures. (link)

Ups and downs

An xkcd, passed along on Facebook by Jack Hamilton:

I struggle to determine if this is actually self-referential, but then my head hurts.

Texting while talking

Today’s Zits returns to the topic of texting and changes in the way people, or at least young people, communicate these days:

Sarah is on the cutting edge here, racing ahead of even Jeremy, who’s no slouch at cultural change.

Bob & Edith’s

Today’s Zippy is about newspapers, their decline, and Griffy’s prediction that they’re about to come back into fashion, as a retro thing. The title — “Valiant Prints” — is a play on the name of the comic strip Prince Valiant (with the words inverted, plus the prince/prints pun). But then there’s another diner, in Bill Griffith’s endless series of them:

What is this postcard of which you speak

In Zitsland, Jeremy has been sorting through the incoming mail. Not long ago, his mother discovered that he had thrown a postcard from his Aunt Joan into the junk mail box, believing that it wasn’t real mail. Jeremy’s mother remonstrates:

Jeremy simply rejects the idea of postcards, as an outmoded system of communications — deservedly outmoded, because it is unacceptably insecure.

Libfix tech disasters

A story making the rounds the past few days, here from Gawker:

NYU Student Accidentally Hits Reply All to 40,000 Students, “Replyallcalypse” Ensues (link)

A familiar sort of technological annoyance that is often responded to with great alarm, hence the ‘disaster’ libfix -(po)calypse. The story excites interest in the general press because of the nature of the annoyance (it slows down an everyday operation), its source (in basic features of mail programs and human factors in their use), and the way people tend to react to it (by mailing to all the victims, by way of outraged complaint, hence compounding the problem). My interest here is mostly in the libfix and its cousin in disaster -(ma)geddon, as applying to technological woes.

We don’t need no steenkin’ land lines

Today’s Zits returns to a familiar topic on this strip and on Zippy: changes in how we communicate across a distance:

Once we wrote letters by hand; then we had the telegraph for important messages; then for quick everyday communication we had phones with dials and (later) phones with buttons; then came cellphones (making us mobile) and e-mail (combining the speed of phones with the asynchronous advantages of letters); and then texting, social media, and tweeting. Who uses which modes of communication for which purposes changes, and very different styles of using the technologies emerge.

Jeremy is so over land lines.

Posting tweets

Today’s Zippy, with birds and software:

A pun on tweet, bird song vs. Twitter message, with an old philosophical conundrum as the vehicle.