The Silicon Jungle
The Times colour supplement on Saturday (02/05/09) did a fascinating one page feature “to give an insight into the pulse of the nation”. It was a graph showing how many stories containing particular words were printed in its pages in each year from 1985 to the present, For example, the word “organic” has shown about a five-fold increase over this period, as we become increasingly neurotic and faddish about so-called healthy diets. The word “Terrorism”, which was already doing pretty well up to 2000, suddenly went hyper when 11/9 happened, (yes, I’m a Brit, and I’m sorry, but I use the more sensible day/month/year format!), since which it has tailed off considerably. And then there’s “Google” of course, whose graph is non-existent until 1999 and then shows, not surprisingly, a steep upward curve. Read more
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