Native North America has long been mult-lingual, and Great Plains peoples used hand signals to bridge the gaps. Plains Indian Sign Language, (PISL) became fairly standardized, and was used by both deaf and hearing people. A Vox video by Ranjani Chakraborty.
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Q: If you read something on an e-reader, will you understand it as well as if you had read it in an ink-on-paper book?
A: Yes.
— “Readers Grasp E-Books Just As Well As Print,” Nic Halverson, Discovery News
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Image (“Mrs. Duffee Seated on a Striped Sofa, Reading Her Kindle, After Mary Cassatt”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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“Last year, Royal Pingdom, which monitors Internet usage, said that in 2010, 107 trillion e-mails were sent. A report this year from the Radicati Group, a market research firm, found that in 2011, there were 3.1 billion active e-mail accounts in the world. The report noted that, on average, corporate employees sent and received 105 e-mails a day.
Sure, some of those e-mails are important. But 105 a day?
All of this has led me to believe that something is terribly wrong with e-mail. What’s more, I don’t believe it can be fixed.”
— “Disruptions: Life’s Too Short for So Much E-Mail,” Nick Bilton, New York Times
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59 percent of Japanese homes have fax machines.
“One reason is that computers, at the outset, never worked well for the Japanese. The country’s language — a mix of three syllabaries, with thousands of complex ‘kanji’ ideograms — bedeviled early-age word-processing software. Until the early 1990s, Japanese was nearly impossible to type. Even today, particularly for older Japanese people, it’s easier to write a letter by hand than with a standard keyboard. Japan also relies on seals, called ‘hanko,’ that are required for most official documents.”
“The government’s long-standing monopoly on phone lines kept high-speed digital Internet rates relatively high — particularly compared with South Korea, where the government promoted cheap broadband use.”
— From “In Japan, fax machines remain important because of language and culture,” by Chico Harlan, Washington Post
Related:
“The Idea for the Fax Machine Has Been Around for 170 Years,” Matt Soniak, Mental Flosss
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Facebook claims 200 million active users in the United States, about two-thirds of the population. “But the company is running into a roadblock,” writes Jenna Wortham. “Some people, even on the younger end of the age spectrum, just refuse to participate, including people who have given it a try.”
“The number of Americans who visited Facebook grew 10 percent in the year that ended in October — down from 56 percent growth over the previous year, according to comScore, which tracks Internet traffic.”
“One of Facebook’s main selling points is that it builds closer ties among friends and colleagues. But some who steer clear of the site say it can have the opposite effect of making them feel more, not less, alienated.”
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