THE 30-HOUR DAY

A new study says that through multi-tasking, Americans have essentially created the 30-hour day. “According to the study, this group of multi-taskers spends most of its leisure time with media and entertainment, or about 4.7 hours a day. But factor in simultaneous activity and it’s jacked up to 7.6 hours – that is, for instance, for 2.9 of those 4.7 actual hours, the average American simultaneously reads magazines and watches TV, or listens to CDs and sends e-mail.” – Inside.com

FEARS OF CULTURAL INVASION

A recent decision by the Korean government to open its door to Japanese culture have put the “local industries concerned on alert.” The biggest causes for alarm appear to be pop music, software games, television…and “Japanimations” – several of which already have “cult” followings in Korea. – Korea Times

KOREA GOES CORPORATE

Korean businessmen are learning a new word in French: “mecenat” –  meaning “the patronage of culture and the arts.” In an attempt to improve their corporate image and give support to the arts, private corporations have increased their donations by 50% since 1998. – Korea Herald

BUYING FREEDOM ONLINE

At around 6pm EST on June 29th, an original first printing of The  Declaration of Independence sold for $8.14 million on Sothebys.com. The same copy, which was last sold for $2.4 million, failed to sell at a regular auction in 1993. So maybe it was the new technology, which allows viewers to examine the document, and the fourth of July holiday that spurred the buyer on. – MSNBC

  • CELEBRITY BUYER: Television producer Norman Lear was the buyer. The price was a record sum for an online auction and far more than the estimated selling price of $4 million to $6 million. – Los Angeles Times

THE MEANING OF COLOR

Why do we think of certain colors as possessing beauty or emotion? “Flamboyant colour has always been associated with the pursuit of the beautiful, with aestheticism, with hedonist visual pleasure. Think of Matisse and his painting The Red Studio, in which every object in the room is choreographed to the rhythm of an overwhelming red; the boundaries of walls, a table and a clock are visible only as traces in redness. The very vocabulary of colour is saturated in ideas of beauty; the word “hue” comes from the Old English for ‘beauty’.” – The Guardian

WHAT’S THE 411?

Everyone talks about the overload of information, the swamp of media overload we find ourselves in the middle of as we enter the 21st Century. “I would like to dispute this view, to argue that every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that communication systems have always shaped events.” – New York Review of Books