“wikipedia”
28 posts under this tag.
The link is the first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries..
Steven Johnson, Interface CultureAM, p110-1
Indeed it is, but then we might as well feel warranted to pose the seldom-asked question of why are hyperlinks underlined. Dull utilitarian answers aside, an intriguing yet plausible historical explanation (or rather, re-interpretation) herefollows.
I believe our answer traces back to the humble clothe buttonA, that immemorial “knoblike appendageWP used on wearing apparel either for ornament or for fastening,” forgotten (as much else) during the Middle Ages, dismissed as vanity by the Puritans, and traded to Native Americans by early settlers.
With society’s mechanization through the first and second Industrial RevolutionsWP, there was dire need to create appropriate interfaces for the control of the suddenly ubiquitous machines and one of the simplest, most versatile methods invented came to be called “button”WP, owing to its creative resemblance to the former fashion accessory (both were usually round after all).
One subtle point, which shall prove of great importance later, must be remarked now: Owing to human factorsWP, most control buttons are usually seen from a very specific angle. Words fail me to further describe it but perhaps some pictures can help to illustrate the matter:   the keyboard on the ←left shows the usual, canonical perspective of buttons we’ve grown accustomed to since the late 18th century, and any other perspective, say, the keyboard on the right→, feels immediately awkward.
But back to our story: When the turn came for society’s computerization, there was again dire need to come up with suitable interfaces for the novel symbolic devices. Abstruse command-lineWP interactions followed at first, but thanks to Xerox PARC’sWP bitmap revolution1 graphical interfacesWP were envisioned (and, eventually, accepted). The new art form required new metaphors2 and prompted a creativity explosion that continues to this day, but few metaphors proved more fertile or intuitive than the visual staple that became the “graphic button”. Beveled out, it’s “push affordance”3 invites interaction (a click, a push, a press) like nothing else we’ve come up with since.
With the advent of the inter-network, you guessed it, that direst of needs—the interface—made itself felt again. We needed a way to link geographically and semantically far-flung documentsEE together. So what if Ted NelsonWP himself, hypertext’s father, was thinking in our trusty ole friend, the button, when he came up with his gift to the world?
The hyperlink might just be the latest, abstract, stylized reincarnation of our centuries-old pal, the button.
As I said on a previous post, I believe Spanish, my mother tongue, has a low status on the web. And as I laid there pondering the subjectivity of my assessment, I remembered Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiWP’s fascinating account of how (and why) he became a scientist (it appears in John Brockman’s excellent Curious MindsAM, a compilation of similar tales by top-notch scientists and a sure recommendation to anyone).
The particular anecdote that came to mind was when he and a friend quarrelled over whose neigborhood was the more communist (the matter was relevant because he was living in Italy and the country was then in political turmoil). Their brilliant analytic idea to try to settle the question was to count out the circulation of the left- and right-leaning newspapers in each of their neighborhoods’s newsstands. This of course sent them into all sorts of interesting statistical considerations, but it put them on the path of finding the subtle answers to their question, and it was certainly better than “the hocus-pocus most adults rely on to bolster their arguments”.
So I want to try to do something similar with my question—what is the linguistic vitality in the web of 14 languages?—and this post will be the beginning of my investigation. For reasons of practicality and personal bias, the 14 languages I’m going to settle to are: EnglishWP, GermanWP, FrenchWP, PolishWP, JapaneseWP, DutchWP, ItalianWP, SwedishWP, PortugueseWP, SpanishWP, FarsiWP, ChineseWP, EsperantoWP, and HindiWP.
I had never before ventured inside the Wikipedia Statistics provided by the Wikimedia Foundation itself but it’s a wonderfully impressive place. Particularly interesting are its charts regarding all the language Wikipedias. It’s graph galore in there: number of wikipedians, active wikipedians_ articles, new articles per day, database bytes, links, words—you name it, and it all dates back to its inception. Not for the faint of bandwidth.
...que hasta yo lo tengo!”
Vicente FernandezWP dixit (supuestamente).
Es increible pero el articulo de la Wikipedia en ingles sobre Vicente Fernandez esta mucho, mucho mas completo que el de la Wikipedia en español. Nuestra lengua materna esta devaluada en internet mucho mas alla de lo que nadie se atreve a decir en voz alta (o en letra grande).
The “boy crisis” is becoming something of a news bubble lately, today’s long sunday article on the New York Times is only its latest instance.
”The idea that girls could be ahead is so shocking that they think it must be a crisis for boys,” Ms. [Sara] Mead [author of a recent educational report] said.
Professors interviewed on several campuses say that in their experience men seem to cluster in a disproportionate share at both ends of the spectrum—students who are the most brilliantly creative, and students who cannot keep up.
What is beyond dispute is that the college landscape is changing. Women now make up 58 percent of those enrolled in two- and four-year colleges and are, over all, the majority in graduate schools and professional schools too.
Since the process of human development crosses all borders, it makes sense that Europe, too, now has more women than men heading to college. The disengagement of young men, though, takes different forms in different cultures. Japan, over the last decade, has seen the emergence of “hikikomori” — young men withdrawing to their rooms, eschewing social life for months or years on end.
At Dickinson [a U.S. College], some professors and administrators have begun to notice a similar withdrawal among men who arrive on campus with deficient social skills. Each year, there are several who mostly stay in their rooms, talk to no one, play video games into the wee hours and miss classes until they withdraw or flunk out.
Don’t forget to check out the excellent Wikipedia article on Japan’s Hikikomoris—it seems they (or should I say we?) are a pretty introspective crowd.
But the strongest outrage was reserved for the film’s final scene, in which Gallo’s character finally meets up with his ex-lover (Chloë Sevigny), and she performs unsimulated fellatio upon him.. Sevigny, already known for taking on controversial roles, had been a real-life girlfriend of Gallo’s. Notably, after the film’s release, the William Morris Agency dropped her as a client, claiming the scene made her unmarketable; she quickly signed with another agency and has continued her acting career despite fears to the contrary.
The quiet last line of this paragraph is a pearl of capitalist freedom that could so easily pass unnoticed, taken-for-granted. If Chloë was able to do what she did was only because she wasn’t tied to prude William Morris, one of the largest talent agencies in the world; it was only because there were other agencies more than willing to take her in.
Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his mercy.
Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
What a wonderful world to live in, isn’t it? One in which puritans can be self-righteous while we enjoy watching a purdy gal blow her ex-boy.
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