Web Monitor
16:43 UK time, Tuesday, 18 August 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
What's the first thing you do when you wake up? Check Web Monitor? If not, why not? It's all the rage.
• A long-running debate in global economics has been about the use of the terms "developed" and "developing" world. Other than suggesting the world sits in one big photographic dark room, some argue that the terms also don't fit when you look at the rise of the mobile phone. In the past 10 years, mobile phones have taken off in Africa - . Now the America is following Africa as Americans are cutting the wires of their landlines and sticking to mobiles:
"Telecoms operators are seeing customers abandon landlines at a rate of 700,000 per month. Some analysts now estimate that 25% of households in America rely entirely on mobile phones... First to suffer are telemarketers, though they cannot expect much sympathy. Mobile numbers are harder to get hold of, and in most cases it is also against the law for telemarketers to call them (although many still do), since mobile users in America are charged for receiving calls as well as making them."
Incidentally, are there more words like "landline"? It's only a word because mobiles came about. Before, they were just phone lines. Other examples welcome via the comment box. Or surely there should be a blog devoted to new words about old things out there somewhere. It could start by wondering what, specifically, these new words about old things could be called. (Before anyone e-mails in, Web Monitor has thought about it and doesn't think "neologism" is quite exact enough.)
• People in the US aren't starting just a casual relationship with mobiles after dumping their landlines. that mobiles are increasingly becoming the first thing they want to look at in the morning:
"After six to eight hours of network deprivation - also known as sleep - people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities."
The riposte to this post comes in the form of a blog post from that trends identified in the New York Times aren't always so widespread as they seem, alleging:
"[E]very anecdotal example in the story comes from the small, insular world of Stone's present and former colleagues, and even from inside the NYT itself."
• Web Monitor wishes for the day that you check us every morning but sometimes wonders why you would bother. Thankfully, why we are motivated to constantly search the internet. Yoffe says dopamine is the chemical which hard-wired the brain to love Google, Twitter, and texting. She says it can all be explained by research by neuroscientists such as Jaak Panksepp:
"[H]e says, 'Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems.' It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world... For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.
The juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine."
is sceptical:
"When you look a tree searching for unusual patterns in the bark, you are getting information and rewards. We could just as easily rewrite the article as 'how the brain hard-wires us to love forests, trees, and curious patterns in the bark'. You could, of course, and the article would be equally as (in)valid scientifically, but you'd never get it in the media because there's currently a market for faux science internet scare stories but not hand-wringing over the addictive potential of trees."
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