As a followup to the activity we did in class this past week, I thought you might be interested in seeing some numbers that show circulation data for the print and digital editions. According to a May 2013 report from the Alliance for Audited Media, circulation looks like this:

• print: 731,395
• digital: 1,133.923

Clearly the digital edition is more popular than the print one. If you go the New York Times website and look for the Media Kit section that offers info to potential advertisers, you can dig up some interesting details about how the readership differs. I took screenshots of the two pages–one for the print and one for the digital–that offer insights into who prefers one format over the other:

Among women there is a slight preference for the online edition over the print, although this difference probably isn’t statistically significant. There is clear evidence here, though, that the the household incomes (HHI) of print subscribers is higher than online, something that was theorized in class by some of you. It’s always good to have data to back up assertions like that.

On the Mental Floss blog this week, there’s a charming video of cute kids being asked to figure out how a rotary phone works.

The blog post also links to an earlier post that gives you a chance to hear 11 sounds of lost or or outmoded technology. And if you want to take a peek at my family’s first home computer, you can see what we had back in 1978-1983: an Apple II.

Have any of you ever used a rotary phone to make a call? If yes, is there anything that you miss about it?

On some recent posts, I’ve seen comments that equate net neutrality with censorship of speech on the web. That’s not quite what the debate is about. Net neutrality is about whether the companies that offer internet access (cable providers like Comcast and Time Warner Cable and wireless companies like AT&T and Verizon) have the right slow down internet traffic on their networks to favor some sites and services over others. Should Comcast be able to charge Netflix fees because so many Comcast customers are using their internet connections to stream Netflix content (if it did, Netflix would surely pass along those costs to its subscribers). Or consider this example taken from a recent interview on NPR with law professor Susan Crawford:

Under a recent court decision, Internet service providers, primarily cable companies, aren’t required to treat all websites equally. They can make deals to provide faster service to some, or slow down sites that refuse to pay them extra fees. Law professor Susan Crawford says you may be experiencing the effects of this — without realizing it.

Why, for example, do you have to wait for YouTube videos to buffer? Crawford explains: “You may think it’s the YouTube application. You may think there is something wrong with your computer. It’s probably the network provider making life unpleasant for YouTube because YouTube has refused to pay in order to cross its wires to reach you. And we’ll be seeing much more of that kind of activity in the future.”

This interview with Susan Crawford is great for clearly laying out the issues and for pointing out just how the lack of competition in the United States has lead us to have miserably slow and overpriced broadband internet access as compared to other developed nations.

For a decade, Facebook has limited the gender choice options on member’s profile pages to the binary of male/female. This week, Facebook has finally accepted that gender is a much more complex concept and now offers 56 options. If you don’t recognize some of these terms, you should look them up (there’s a few that I’m not familiar with).

What ways do you think this might change the many communities that exist on Facebook?

We haven’t yet gotten to discussing the ways that our increasing reliance on technology has created hurdles for those members of society that can’t afford the latest or the right technology. A case in point is the new enrollment system in New York City for kindergarden. If you are a parent and you want to sign up your kid to begin kindergarden in fall 2014, you now must do so online (previously, you could fill out paper forms). While there are obvious advantages in efficiency by moving to an electronic enrollment system, there are serious disadvantages for those who don’t have a computer and internet connection or who haven’t been able to learn how to use such technologies.

In the news website, DNA Info, there’s a story today about this new online-only enrollment process and how it is having unintended consequences for those on the wrong side of the digital divide. Can you think of other parts of civic life, especially vital ones like schooling, where the digital divide might be playing out?

On the Free Press blog today, I ran across an interesting story that notes that the only way you can legally watch live streaming coverage of the Winter Olympics on the web here is if you are also a cable TV subscriber. If you just get internet access from your local cable TV company and don’t get TV as well, you’re out of luck if you want to watch live streaming coverage on NBC.

Can anyone think of why this move by NBC and Comcast might be defensible?

There was an interesting post on the Atlantic Monthly blog yesterday spotlighting efforts by Buzzfeed’s editors to reign in spelling discrepancies among its stable of authors. The web is an incredible source of new slang and jargon and arguments about how to spell these new additions to our language. Consider your own position on things like:

• “website” vs. “web site”
• “email” vs. “e-mail”
• “LOL” vs “lol”

In much the way that the older media companies–such as the New York Times, the Associated Press, book publishers, etc.–have had to develop rules for its writers to follow over the decades, so too are exclusively online-only media companies like Buzzfeed having to try to come up with some standardization to spelling for the web-centric jargon that they heavily rely on.

Things to think about (and maybe comment on):

• Can you think of other style guides out there?
• What are some other places where you see new language and slang being documented or debated?
• Is spelling ever settled for good? If so or if not, why?