Columbia Journalism Review:
Manjoo wrote about what he learned from his two months away from social media, and dispensed avuncular advice to his readers about the benefits of slowing down one’s news consumption.
But he didn’t really unplug from social media at all. The evidence is right there in his Twitter feed, just below where he tweeted out his column: Manjoo remained a daily, active Twitter user throughout the two months he claims to have gone cold turkey, tweeting many hundreds of times, perhaps more than 1,000.
Manjoo’s piece was widely shared on social media but I read it with my usual dose of hefty skepticism about everything Manjoo writes and he didn’t disappoint. Or rather, he disappointed in exactly the way I knew he would.
“A Times spokesperson said the paper doesn’t view his assertion as a falsehood, and won’t be issuing a correction.”
There was a time when the NYT was a journalism institution with standards. Long ago.
I post automatically to Twitter from my blog. I haven’t really been on there and looked at my feed for months. So, to a casual observer, I’d look active, but that’s really not the case.
Manjoo was also retweeting and commenting on other tweets, so he was actually using Twitter itself.
That’s not the case here. https://twitter.com/fmanjoo
from the article of his other wackiness, the guy sounds like a total chump.
a so called Tech columnist says he disconnected from social media only he stayed on Twitter.
sounds like he doesn’t understand what social media is.
He’s backtracking, of course. I still remember his frequent mentions on Angry Mac Bastards… for all the right reasons.
Let’s not exaggerate. Lots of excellent journalism, with high standards for accuracy, comes from the NYT. It would be nice if we could all know the other side of the story before passing absolute judgment.
Oh, how I miss AMB. Eventually they went too far, but when they were hot, wow! They helped me keep a healthy dose of skepticism when reading all the Mac fanboy woo I was reading and hearing at the time.
Manjoo is an exception to good journalism, which, I must admit, no one newspaper has an exclusive on, NYT included. Some real doozies with cooked-uo stories, no names need be mentioned here.
Indeed. It sure was nice to have a commentary track on the gossip columns that too much tech reporting had become.
Cheers to Loop alumnus Peter Cohen (if you’re still reading this, sir).
Also, thanks to Loop contributor Shawn King for having taken his own stab at debunkable tech rumormongering back then, as well.
What a hack. I was willing to take his original assertion that what he really meant was that he didn’t use Twitter as a source of news, then come to find he commented, specifically, on news stories on Twitter in that time.
I will say that his basic assertion, that you are more reliably informed if you get news a day later, rather than while it is happening, is true. There are so many false reports (benign and otherwise) during an event it’s impossible to believe most of them.
Yet another reason why I miss Angry Mac Bastards.
“Back then”? WTF!? I did it *before* AMB, I did it *during* AMB, and I’m doing it *after* AMB. I’M THE ORIGINAL AMB, GODDAMNIT!
Hee.
I was referring specifically to that 2011 “ratings” site you set up, “Stupid Apple Rumors.” It was fun to see such commentary quantified.
Remember when the Times had David Pogue?
Oh, and I disconnected from social media about 8 years ago. My mind is clear and my concscience is clean.