[LINK] "Jurassic Web"

Slate's Farhad Manjoo reminds me of what the Internet used to be like way back when.

It's 1996, and you're bored. What do you do? If you're one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you'd do in 2009: Go online. Crank up your modem, wait 20 seconds as you log in, and there you are—"Welcome." You check your mail, then spend a few minutes chatting with your AOL buddies about which of you has the funniest screen name (you win, pimpodayear94).

Then you load up Internet Explorer, AOL's default Web browser. Now what? There's no YouTube, Digg, Huffington Post, or Gawker. There's no Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia. A few newspapers and magazines have begun to put their articles online—you can visit the New York Times or Time—and there are a handful of new Web-only publications, including Feed, HotWired, Salon, Suck, Urban Desires, Word, and, launched in June, Slate. But these sites aren't very big, and they don't hold your interest for long. People still refer to the new medium by its full name—the World Wide Web—and although you sometimes find interesting stuff here, you're constantly struck by how little there is to do. You rarely linger on the Web; your computer takes about 30 seconds to load each page, and, hey, you're paying for the Internet by the hour. Plus, you're tying up the phone line. Ten minutes after you log in, you shut down your modem. You've got other things to do—after all, a new episode of Seinfeld is on.

I started thinking about the Web of yesteryear after I got an e-mail from an idly curious Slate colleague: What did people do online back when Slate launched, he wondered? After plunging into the Internet Archive and talking to several people who were watching the Web closely back then, I've got an answer: not very much.

[LINK] "Will invoking the Great Depression bring it on?"

Heather Scoffield, economics reporter for The Globe and Mail, wonders.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who heads the International Monetary Fund, has suggested that the world's major economies are "already in depression." Economist bad-boy Nouriel Roubini warns that the United States is in a "near depression."

Such seemingly casual use of the D word has many analysts balking, warning of the effect such a mindset can have in an already fragile economy plagued by a lack of consumer and business confidence.

"The Depression narrative is not merely a story about the past: It has started to inform our current expectations," the influential Yale University economist and New York Times columnist Robert J. Shiller wrote recently.

[. . .]

[A]s confidence in the banking system continues to falter, jittery investors drive down stock markets and inflation hovers close to zero, more economists are grappling with the possibility that the deepening recession could turn into something worse and more intractable - a slump that may earn the D-word moniker, even if it doesn't replicate the misery of the 1930s. "It's a worry," says Angela Redish, an economics historian at the University of British Columbia.

[BRIEF NOTE] South African language futures

South Africa's News 24 carried an interesting story on South African language dynamics some months back.

Black parents increasingly have chosen mother-tongue education instead of English in the past few years for their children in the foundation phase (Grade 1 to Grade 3) of their education.

This was a conclusion of a recently publicised study done by the director and head of the socio-economic surveys division of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), Dr Joseph Mbithi wa Kivilu.

Wa Kivulu said that although there was consensus that mother-tongue education was best in early school education, there was still a meaningful public alliance to English.

This was a lot less prevalent among Afrikaans speakers.

The study took place between 2003 and 2006 among nearly 3 000 respondents.

The respondents comprised of 62.8% black people, 15.7% brown people, 9.9% Indians and 11.6% whites.

Respondents were asked what they thought the medium of instruction should be in different phases of education.

In the initial study in 2003, the majority of respondents - except Afrikaans-speakers - preferred English, even in the foundation phase.

It was found that race, monthly income and level of education were the main influences on the decision.

As far as race was concerned, Indian people followed by black people were more prone to choosing English as the language of preference in the foundation phase than whites.

Those without income were more prone to choose English in this phase than people who were better-off.

This tendency declined as income increased.

As Jacques Leclerc argues in his survey of the South African linguistic situation, official policies of multilingualism aren't often reflected on the ground, with the traditionally dominant languages of Afrikaans and especially English remaining more prestigious and in wider use than the various relatively less advantaged (in terms of mass media, economic, educational, and governmental power) Bantu languages spoken (so far, at least) as mother tongues by something like three-quarters of the population. Part of this might also have to do with reaction against apartheid, when members of different ethnic groups were forced to remain members of these ethnolinguistic groups so as to accentuate divisions among South Africa's non-whites, these ethnolinguistic groups in turn being inherently subordinate and second-class; a great way to make people reject traditions of any kind is to make them hate the traditions as confining, even demeaning.

Ian Bekker's study of the situation facing isiXhosa doesn't preclude the possibility that speakers of the Xhosa ethnic language might be moving towards English monolingualism. As Leclerc notes, the possibility exists that multiethnic South Africa might evolve into a thoroughly Anglophone country.