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The Times tech columnist ‘unplugged’ from the internet, except he didn’t
- EtDybNuvCu 9y agoThe article doesn't render with JS disabled, but does render in Firefox's reader mode.
- colemannugent 9y agoHonestly, reader was what made me want to switch to Firefox. When the performance between FF and Chrome was about equal I jumped ship and I've been loving it. No more using some crazy bookmarklet to remove silly CSS just so I can RTFA.
- falcolas 9y agoI had to close the pop-over, re-open the link, and refresh just to read more than the headline of the article. This is just with uBlock installed. Seriously, WTF is up with web pages these days?
- paulie_a 9y agoIt's all about user engagement... In that a lot of websites don't want users to apparently engage with content
- cbhl 9y agoCan a modern tech journalist even unplug from the Internet if they wanted to? I was under the impression that most journalists have a (contractual) daily "tweet quota" that they have to meet.
- tw1010 9y agoI would assume that quota could be lifted if they set about writing an article like that.
- danso 9y agoPlenty of NYT journalists who don't use Twitter, particularly the ones in leadership roles. There is a social media policy but not any type of contractual quota: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/reader-center/social-media-guidelines.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/reader-center/social-medi... - Dean Baquet (editor in chief) has just 2 tweets: https://twitter.com/deanbaquet https://twitter.com/deanbaquet - James Bennet (editorial page editor) https://twitter.com/JBennet https://twitter.com/JBennet - A.G. Sulzberger (publisher, but worked as a bureau reporter for a few years) https://twitter.com/agsnyt https://twitter.com/agsnyt 2014 article about whether it mattered if NYT people knew how to use twitter: https://gigaom.com/2014/09/29/does-it-matter-that-some-new-york-times-editors-and-writers-dont-tweet-yes-and-no/ https://gigaom.com/2014/09/29/does-it-matter-that-some-new-y...
- montrose 9y agoI felt bad about upvoting this, because the writer is so nasty about it. His style of writing feels like long-form Twitter trolling. But I upvoted it because the information in it is important. It shows how addictive Twitter is. It also shows how plugged in you can be and still feel yourself to be unplugged. Farhad ends up seeming like an alcoholic talking about how he's on the wagon, and then you look down and there's a bottle in his hand. The important point though is not that he's some sort of hypocrite, but that it could be any of us.
- danso 9y agoYeah this piece was definitely more ad hominem than it needed to be. Ironically, Manjoo confessing to not being able to completely cut off Twitter would've made for a more compelling story, even if it meant a less sexy and concise headline and summary. But that would bolster the overall theme that situations/stories are just too complicated to be summed up in Tweet-optimized headlines.
- tptacek 9y ago"Ad hominem" means "to the person". The way we use it on message boards, referring to the "ad hominem fallacy", we mean "an argument improperly addressed to the person who made it, rather than to the argument itself". That's clearly not what's happened here; the argument is intrinsically about Farhad Manjoo. Articles criticizing the actions of people aren't intrinsically fallacious. There's a good blog post somewhere about this phenomenon, which it dubs "the ad hominem fallacy fallacy".
- danso 9y agoThat’s a fair point. What I had meant to say was that Manjoo’s history of questionable articles (which, to be fair, are just a few selections from a very long and generally liked career) did not seem directly relevant to whether he is being misleading now, other than to imply that he is generally a poor pundit/writer. But you’re right that the argument refers to his work as evidence and not to Manjoo himself.
- gregorymichael 9y agoUnfortunate to see this kind of trivial doublespeak -- "What does unplugged mean, really?" -- from the purported paper of record.
- UncleEntity 9y agoVirtue signaling is what the kids are calling it these days I believe.
- shaki-dora 9y agoI generally hate these kids and that term of theirs, because it’s extremely lazy to use s/o’s admittedly virtuous words as an argument against them. But in this case My problem starts even earlier, b/c I just have no earthly idea how this has anything to do with “virtue signaling”.
- UncleEntity 9y agoWell, in this case I'd say they can hand out advice by claiming they did the "virtuous" task of unplugging while not actually having unplugged. Be like me claiming I'm helping Mother Earth by recycling when all I do set aluminum cans besides the dumpster instead of inside it to make it a little easier for the homeless folks to get at them.
- prepend 9y agoIt’s funny, there must be an old man internet club that I need to join. I was thrown by the use of virtue signaling. There have been many exchanges that I’ve observed in confusion not know what it meant other than one group of assholes were using it as an insult and another group of assholes were calling the name callers asshole. This article didn’t help me, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/02/people-who-accuse-others-virtue-signalling-are-trying-stigmatise-empathy https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/02/people-who-... But interestingly OP’s post finally let me understand that it’s someone saying they are doing something virtuous (eg, unplug from internet) while not doing it (still tweeting). So I guess it’s a kind of hypocrisy. I still don’t understand why someone takes offense. If someone accused me of virtue signaling, wouldn’t the best response be to present evidence of virtue (eg, corrected logs showing no usage) rather than attacking the accuser?
- danso 9y agoFWIW, his last 3,200 tweets (as pulled from the API) and a graph of his daily tweeting rate: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nFHsiPWvYwUmopXWbx6TbCyqvjI61aTR5QnCqirwdrs/edit#gid=1366541661 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nFHsiPWvYwUmopXWbx6T... After the second week in January, he definitely tweeted far less than he usually does. But it's still far from being "unplugged". It's not just whether or not his original column claimed to have completely cut off Twitter, but how it omitted any mention of the relevant fact that he continued to tweet during this time. You can tweet without getting your news from Twitter. OTOH, you can read a lot of Twitter without tweeting very much, and it's clear he was reading and tweeting about the kind of bullshit that he claims newspapers don't get to printing. To me, it's comical/sad how Manjoo couldn't simply quit Twitter for a few weeks after coming up with the idea to make this a big feature. It's as if social media is a basic life necessity for him and he could only do the equivalent of fasting.
- fullshark 9y agoWere any of the tweets automated?
- striking 9y agoYou can open the "tweets" tab in GP's linked doc. None of them look particularly automated.
- Sir_Substance 9y agoMy first thought was well. It's quite likely that the times as a full time social media manager that makes sure none of their columnists feeds ever goes too quiet. That probably takes the form of either a robot automatically posting snippets under the names of journalists in the right departments or an intern/entry level position handling 40 accounts at once. It may be that he really did go offline, and forgot that if you take his twitter account at face value it looks like he lied.
- noname120 9y agoYour hypothesis is contradicted by the article: > Manjoo objects to that characterization. “I think it’s clear that I meant I ‘unplugged’ from Twitter as a source of news, not that I didn’t tweet at all,” he wrote.
- xirdstl 9y agoI thought this was a bit illuminating: > During the first two weeks of February, he tweeted, on average, more than 15 times a day. He refrained completely from tweeting on only five days—all on weekends. That’s far from obsessive, but it’s even farther from “unplugged.” It is, in fact the opposite of “unplugged.” More than 15 tweets per day is far from obsessive? I'm not much of a Twitter user, but that does seem like a lot.
- corobo 9y agoYeah 15 per day does seem obsessive. I wouldn't be surprised to find I've tweeted less than 15 times this year so far
- icebraining 9y agoWell, it's not Twitter, but my brother often reaches the limit of 250 sms/day of his cell plan, so 15 doesn't sound much. I don't think you can measure it in absolute numbers, though; as far as I know, "obsessive behavior" is defined by factors such as the negative effects on the rest of your life.
- majewsky 9y ago> it's not Twitter And that's the problem with this comparison. SMS are not used like tweets, they're used like IM messages. So 250 SMS per day should be compared to e.g. 250 Telegram messages per day, not to 250 tweets per day.
- icebraining 9y agoYes, that is the problem, that's why I wrote that :) Still, there's back-and-forth in Twitter too. Plus the character limit, which is 14x higher in Telegram (though smaller in SMSs).
- matt4077 9y agoFor journalists, it’s arguably part of the job. Both as personal PR, as well as cultivating sources and being well-informed. A lot of actual news does happen on Twitter these days.
- ramzyo 9y agoI think it’s important that this information be out there. At the same time I echo some of the other commenters’ sentiments about the tone of the piece. What’s the point after the initial first few paragraphs? The whole bit after the actual newsworthy part (that he was actually using Twitter for news consumption) regarding his CV framed in a suspicious tone doesn’t end in any meaningful conclusion. Just seems like an attempt at a takedown piece. FWIW, I found the original article in the NYT to be an interesting and thought-provoking read, regardless of whether or not the author was taking sips under the table of what he was arguing against. Where that falls on the spectrum of unethical journalism I’m not sure. Feels pretty tame as compared to some of the other things we see in today’s media climate, but that’s just one opinion.
- prepend 9y ago“FWIW, I found the original article in the NYT to be an interesting and thought-provoking read, regardless of whether or not the author was taking sips under the table of what he was arguing against.” I think this is the danger. I agree with the theme, so I ignore the data. The piece makes claims based on author’s direct evidence. That evidence is wrong. We have to have a strict policy of relying on data even if emotionally we support the hypothesis. Also the fact that news has to have a high standard for objectivity. The standard has to be high for banal stuff like this do we believe the important articles where it matters.
- ramzyo 9y agoInteresting and good points. I guess personally I’m more comfortable agreeing with the theme and ignoring the data for pieces like this, primarily because it’s more like a blog post than a serious news piece (the NYT might take issue with my characterization). I hold it to the same standard as conversation with peers about matters of personal choice and lifestyle. There may be fallacies and contradictions, but strict correctness isn’t as important to me in those settings, and hence not in a blog-post-like piece like this in the NYT. But, again, I see this as a matter of opinion because I don’t see Manjoo as having violated journalistic ethics here.
- danso 9y ago
- keithpeter 9y agoI can imagine someone posting to twitter while being 'unplugged' (i.e. not reading social media, email or Web pages &c) by the use of a teletype or typewriter of some kind or an sms gateway. Messages in a bottle sort of thing. But re-tweeting currently popular pages is something of a giveaway. I personally found Mr Miller's take on this interesting. https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/1/4279674/im-still-here-back-online-after-a-year-without-the-internet https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/1/4279674/im-still-here-back...
- John_KZ 9y agoInteresting article. I've been offline for a long time too. There are 2 components to this problem: One is the inherent "disconnected-ness" of reality without the internet (which is both good and bad, depending on the occasion) and the other is that you're going against the flow. Sure, it was harder to meet new people and communicate 20 years ago, but there was the intent, the understanding and the social norms required for it. People were more talkative. You could drop by somebody's house like it's no big deal. You could call people to chat and catch up. Other people were looking to communicate offline too. Now that just doesn't happen. Unless you manage to find a core/community of people willing to stay offline, disconnecting from the internet just disconnects you from society to a large extent. What would be ideal, is to "disconnect" from the bad influences of the internet. Had a better, non-addictive, non-brainwashing version of facebook/twitter existed, more people would like to connect and stay connected, feel better about it, and better, more meaningful relationships would form.
- tomtimtall 9y agoSo the takeaway is that he got paid to plug paper-news and created a narrative to support that plug without actually doing any of the “this is how I started feeling better”-dieting. He still was on social, he still followed the news and commented on it. So why lie about avoiding it and feeling better? Because that was an essential part of his paper-news plug that he had to do. Why was he forced to do it? Because he already took the money. If he had actual journalistic integrity he would have written a piece about how hard it can be to actually unplug detailing his own failed attempt.
- gnicholas 9y ago> If he had actual journalistic integrity he would have written a piece about how hard it can be to actually unplug detailing his own failed attempt. This would be a really interesting piece. He could talk about the pressures, both generic and journalism-specific, that make it difficult to let your Twitter feed go dormant. And he could talk about any other challenges/failures that he experienced, and why.
- matt4077 9y agoIs there any indication that he was “being paid to plug paper-news” or is this just your conspiracy theory? Because if it’s the latter, it’s a decidedly lame conspiracy. And considering the financial pressures, I’m not even sure if the New York Times could afford to bribe someone writing for the New York Times.
- coolso 9y agoHow is it "lame"? It's common knowledge that media is a significant influencer of those who consume it (pretty much everyone), so it follows that writing an article suggesting that X may be superior to Y (because Y is bad) would influence many into thinking similarly if they hadn't been thinking that already, or further reinforce that feeling if they had. All it had to take was for anyone at the NY Times to bring up in a meeting "hey, we'd like to try to get our paper subs up a bit, someone write an article about unplugging from the net (something tons of people talk about but never actually do) about how newspapers are actually better". Worst case scenario it doesn't work out, it was a nice experiment and at least you brought in a lot of clicks and got to bring up fake news and Russian Twitter bots in another story, right? Media is always biased and always has an agenda one way or another, I'm not sure why in this case it would have to be any different.
- mcguire 9y agoMoney quote: "A Times spokesperson said the paper doesn’t view his assertion as a falsehood, and won’t be issuing a correction." Really? Completely given up, have they?
- matt4077 9y agoIt’s a column, which has lower standards than their “real” reporting. If you read any news by the NYT you must have come across corrections often enough to know that they tend to correct even the most inconsequential errors. I would suspect that they ruled “unplugged” as a fundamentally subjective term and stopped deliberating right there and then.
- samastur 9y agoI agree with everything except that "even" in the second sentence. It would be more correct without it. Bigger the error, the more difficult it gets (for anyone including media) to admit it.
- prepend 9y agoThis is frustrating. NYTimes is supposed to be the paper of record. But you have to do simple fact checking on puff pieces like this one. Comments like this mean that editors likely knew Manjoo wasn’t offline, but allowed the piece because somehow they thought that 15 tweets/day was offline. So they are either liars who misled, or even more worrisome, aren’t able to discern reality enough that saying “I unplugged from Twitter” is compatible with daily tweeting. It would have been so easy to add some editorial note on what the author meant by unplugging so users weren’t misled. It is frustrating because as a consumer, I would like an objective source of news. Not to pick the best worldview I like and let them filter reality for me. It’s also annoying because the fake news people will constantly point out these frequent inaccuracies in even reputable papers.
- greeneggs 9y agoI'm not sure anyone here is reading the actual articles, or even the titles. This story has the headline, "The Times tech columnist ‘unplugged’ from the internet. Except he didn’t". But that's not what Manjoo claimed at all. He never said he was offline. The title of the Times article is "For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned." The story isn't about being disconnected from the internet, it is about getting the news the next day, in print, instead of from nytimes.com, news alerts, twitter posts, etc. It's not a question of whether he tweeted, it is a question of where he got his news.
- icebraining 9y agoI don't really give a damn about the issue, but I want to thank the author for showing me the word "avuncular".
- chias 9y agoReading through this article, I was somewhat jarred by this sentence: "It seems likely that Manjoo isn’t lying, and that he really believes he had unplugged, and really believes that his weak-sauce explanations don’t belie the point of his column." Up until that point, the article has been professional, well spoken, and precise. I know it's a small thing, but the inclusion of the term "weak-sauce" instantly dealt a blow to the image of maturity I had constructed of the author. The paragraph itself would be no less compelling (perhaps even more-so) had the term simply been omitted without replacement. I spent the rest of the article wondering if this was thoughtful journalism or some college kid's essay.
- always_good 9y agoAgreed. It's like seeing "for the win" or, nowadays, "lit." Takes a juvenile turn without paying for itself in expressiveness. Same reason cussing is unprofessional.
- jclulow 9y agoThat's just, like, your opinion, man. I have only ever worked in places where people have sworn like the proverbial sailor, but where those same people have treated their work incredibly seriously, and their colleagues with respect and empathy. Professionalism is about so much more than wearing the right tie and avoiding particular words.
- shaki-dora 9y agoI think what’s far more important about that sentence is something commendable: they’re showing good faith in giving the author the benefit of the doubt. Your objection to the specific phrase is, I believe, an attachment to a somewhat superficial definition of “professionalism”. It reminds me of the US President’s caricature of the term “presidential”, where he seems to believe that “being presidential” would require him to speak in a fake British accent and never make a joke. His predecessor already appeared on comedy shows and threw footballs through the Oval Office, without ever (seriously) being considered “unpresidential”. Because the term is far more about content than style. See also Hunter S Thompson or Tom Wolfe for examples of respected journalists dispensing with unnessary decorum.
- crawfordcomeaux 9y agoThis article is coming from a place of old thinking when it comes to addiction recovery. On top of that, it strikes me as trying to shame Manjoo, which would be a harmful thing to attempt to do toward anyone, but especially toward an addict. The author seems to apply black-and-white thinking in the form of abstinence-only recovery. Also, everyone's point of sufficient disconnection will be different based on the person, as well as what kind of effects they wish to see. Rigid thinking is another sign of addiction, so is OP's author demonstrating their own need for growth through their rigid definition of "disconnection"? To better understand these points, here's a little bit about why I have these views: I'm a recovering information addict of a little over 2 years and doing so requires changing our definitions of what classic recovery looks like. Abstinence models (ie. "completely unplugging," which is not what Manjoo did) for recovery are unrealistic and can contribute to shame components of addiction. As well, the common characterizations of lapses/relapses can inhibit growth/learning. It's not possible to completely disconnect from information and, therefore, it's possible to see great benefits from any dramatic behavioral change around an info source (or multiple ones). OP's author seems to be applying some form of black and white thinking and assumes they know how much disconnection is necessary for Manjoo to see differences. That's not possible, so the underlying premise of OP isn't wrong, but it's moot. The true question is did Manjoo see a shift in their reality/experience. That's the question we need more data to answer and it may only be self-reported qualitative data. That's ok. The chart in these spreadsheets confirms their behavior shifted dramatically and I know that can lead to effects. In my case, completely disconnecting wasn't enough. I had to stop looking things up in books before withdrawal symptoms showed up in the form of vivid dreams that woke me up 1-3 times per night. That withdrawal period lasted 9 months and I wasn't completely disconnected throughout the period, but I mostly was. I have device usage data front then and intend to publish it as part of a larger work on addiction recovery, in general. It took me 9 months to dissect and reprogram my behavior to the point that my mind didn't have to live out in dreams what I was removing. I absolutely believe a sharp, sustained decrease in Twitter usage is enough to spot basic ways in which excessive behavior negatively impacts life.
- eggy 9y agoI do believe he thinks he was being truthful and objective, however, fact is he was not unplugged. He is like the addict in denial already posited here to a point that it really makes me wonder about my own assessment of how 'little' I am online. Another crazy thought is how this really feeds into the 'fake news' meme. A Times journalist basically not relaying the truth about a thing he himself is in control of, and not another party. How can you expect objective reporting, if he cannot even be honest about himself or his own actions? He should have wrote the 'I failed at it' story with some deep thoughts on why for him, and for all who seem to be attached to the wire. Good side: he was outed by the CJR practicing good journalism.
- jancsika 9y ago> It seems likely that Manjoo isn’t lying, and that he really believes he had unplugged, and really believes that his weak-sauce explanations don’t belie the point of his column. Quick speculation-- he made print news the main source of his news-reading time and remained plugged in. Then he intentionally misrepresented that process as "unplugging" to make the process sound less boring, and in the process did in fact lie. For many reasons the modern world prefers buffoonery to mendacity. So in his response he made the unverifiable claim that his redefinition of "unplugged" was made in good faith and doubled down on buffoonery. Is there a more likely theory?
- EddieSpeaks 9y agoFarhad Manjoo was one of the big influencers who helped create the huge twitter mob who went after Justine Sacco, the women who lost her job and got shamed online for one innocent tweet. These mediamen are only interested in theatrics. Obviously don’t trust his word on disconnecting from the internet.
- danso 9y agoWorth pointing out that Manjoo was largely silent over the weekend in response to the OP article -- which definitely did not help his case, but we can chalk up to him maybe wanting to not get worked up over the weekend. He has this afternoon made a few tweets in his defense: https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/972888102900350976 https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/972888102900350976 I've found his explanation to be unsatisfactory, since his standard seems to be (paraphrased) "Well I didn't lie", as if leaving out context and facts is a lesser problem -- there's a reason why courts ask you to swear to tell not just "the truth" but "the whole truth".
- notananthem 9y agoGood article.