Encyclopedia Britannica: Halts the presses after 244 years

Say goodbye to the bound volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The reference book publisher says it will discontinue its print version and go solely online. It published the first digital version in 1981 and now updates the Britannica.com website daily, competing with newer players such as crowdsourced Wikipedia. Read more at Business Week

Slaves to the smartphone

For most people the servant has become the master. Not long ago only doctors were on call all the time. Now everybody is. Bosses think nothing of invading their employees’ free time. Work invades the home far more than domestic chores invade the office. Otherwise-sane people check their smartphones obsessively, even during pre-dinner drinks, and send e-mails first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

This is partly because smartphones are addictive: when Martin Lindstrom, a branding guru, tried to identify the ten sounds that affect people most powerfully, he found that a vibrating phone came third, after the Intel chime and a giggling baby.

Hyperconnectivity exaggerates some of the most destabilising trends in the modern workplace: the decline of certainty (as organisations abandon bureaucracy in favour of adhocracy), the rise of global supply chains and the general cult of flexibility.

Ms Perlow’s advice should be taken seriously. The problem of hyperconnectivity will only get worse, as smartphones become smarter and young digital natives take over the workforce. The faster smartphones become and the more alluring the apps that are devised for them, the stronger the addiction will grow.

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Linkedin: fastest and slowest growing job titles in America

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The internet is changing Chinese literature

Chinese people increasingly read books on phones, tablets and laptops. People under 30, who are most likely to own such devices, are the most avid readers, says Eric Abrahamsen, a Beijing-based publishing consultant. The result has been an outpouring of mass-market fiction, written (and read) on websites, not in print. Five years ago internet publishers were typically informal, back-room outfits, but Shanda, an online gaming company, seized the commercial opportunity and now owns most of the literary sites. It sells subscriptions by the chapter or book, by the week or month. Online novels start at around five yuan ($0.80) compared with 30 yuan for an average printed volume. Some of this online material makes it into book form. Print sales, dominated by the country’s 580 state-owned publishing houses, are now worth 44 billion yuan ($7 billion). But growth has slowed from 10% a year in 2007 to around 5%, according to Yang Wei of OpenBook, a market-research firm. Like many online start-ups, Shanda is not yet making money out of web books, although revenues are growing. Read more here

Kony2012: New Media Success Story or Cautionary Tale?

If it isn’t the most viral social-media effort in recent memory, the Kony2012 campaign—launched last week by Invisible Children to spotlight atrocities by Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony—has to be a close second. According to one estimate, a video created by the group and shared widely on Facebook and Twitter was viewed 80 million times in just five days. Some critics, however, say the Kony campaign is troubling for a number of reasons, including the fact that it is a glib and facile treatment of systemic problems in Uganda and therefore encourages meaningless “slacktivism” instead of real action. Is Kony2012 a sign of how powerful social media can be as a news distribution mechanism, a sign of how dangerous it can be, or both? Emily Bell (director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University) tweeted on how this is becoming the way news works now: “I am watching #Kony2012 ‘my 11 yr old:’oh I’ve seen that: I’ve already emailed it to my grade’.This is the new news cycle.” Read more here

Only 1 in 5 Americans believe journalists are “friendly” toward religion

19 percent of Americans feel like “reporters and the news media” are “friendly” to religion, a Pew study finds. 38 percent of the respondents thought journalists were “neutral”; 35 percent said they were “unfriendly.” Read more here

Apple’s vast TV ambitions

Apple is working on a sleek, futuristic television that it hopes will do to home entertainment what the iPod did to the music industry. Apple is also reportedly urging cable companies and media providers to redesign how consumers get TV programming. Read more here

The Pulse App Goes Local

With 13 million users, Pulse is the most popular news app. Its creators aim to stay No. 1 with a push into local and international content. Just as it does with articles from major publications, Pulse will display each local news story or deal as a colorful tile, and arrange them in horizontal rows for easy navigating. Pulse says the local news sites that participate will benefit from the extra traffic and exposure to millions of new users. “It’s definitely a way we see of growing and expanding our audience,” says Chris Appelgren, marketing lead at Bold Italic, whose San Francisco-focused stories attract 85,000 unique visitors a month. Read more here

Socially aggressive narcissism

Researchers have established a direct link between the number of friends you have on Facebook and the degree to which you are a "socially disruptive" narcissist, confirming the conclusions of many social media sceptics. People who score highly on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory questionnaire had more friends on Facebook, tagged themselves more often and updated their newsfeeds more regularly. The latest study, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, also found that narcissists responded more aggressively to derogatory comments made about them on the social networking site's public walls and changed their profile pictures more often. A number of previous studies have linked narcissism with Facebook use, but this is some of the first evidence of a direct relationship between Facebook friends and the most "toxic" elements of narcissistic personality disorder. Read more here

Teenagers Now Texting 60 Times a Day

According to a new report by the Pew Research Center, the average teen texts a whopping 60 times per day. Nearly two-thirds of teenagers interviewed said they texted with friends every day—almost once every 15 minutes they were awake. Read more here