NYTimes Columnist Proves That Among Billions Of Tweets Some People Say Stuff You Don't Care About

Too Much Free Time

from the hot-damn dept

Recently, among the “oversharers” online, I saw a few people link to a column by NYTimes’ columnist Roger Cohen, using one of the hackiest of all the “old curmudgeon” hack columns around: bitching about the banal stuff people talk about on Twitter. It’s been done hundreds of times, and it’s mostly been done better than Cohen’s weak attempt. And, of course, it’s easy to take such things out of context. The most common complaint that people make: people sharing info about their lunch, with the obvious presumption that no one could possibly care about what someone’s eating for lunch. And yet… context matters greatly. Just as an example, one of the things that made me once realize how useful Twitter was in the early days, was when I saw someone I knew only via the internet, mention that he was eating lunch at a restaurant that I really liked in another city. Combined with the fact that I was going to be in that city the following week, we arranged to meet for lunch the following week at the same place. That “banal and useless” oversharing of info actually resulted in something quite useful: tidbits of information leading to a personal connection.

Separately, as I (and tons of others) have suggested in the past, if you find the people you follow say banal and silly things, follow better, more interesting people. And yet, as came out about a week after Cohen’s silly column was published, it wasn’t even a case of Cohen following silly and banal people. It turns out that, while he implied he was following such people on Twitter, in reality, he went searching for silly and banal tweets… and found them on a site that shares exactly that kind of info. Here’s what his original column said:

Now I was determined to get through 2012 without doing a peevish column, not wishing to appear cantankerous or curmudgeonly, determined to be sunny and youthful as the times demand, but everyone has a tipping point. Mine occurred when I came across this tweet from Claire:

“Have such a volcanically deep zit laying roots in my chin that it feels like someone hit me with a right cross.”

Good to know, Claire.

I was just recovering from that when I found Deanna tweeting that she had “picked up pet food” and was heading to “the dreaded consult on colon stuff. The joys of turning 50.” As for Kate she let the world know the status of her labor: “Contractions 3 minutes apart and dilated at 2 cm.”

Social media does not mean that you have to be that social.

Except… apparently Cohen’s “tipping point” did not actually come when he “came across” those tweets. That’s because the second “tweet” was not actually a “tweet” and did not even happen in 2012 (or 2011 for that matter). The first was actually a tweet, but also did not occur in 2012 or 2011. And these weren’t something that he just randomly “came across,” but rather something he went looking for. You see, the NYT appended the following editor’s note:

In this column, the author suggested that he was moved to talk about over-sharing and anxiety online after he came across two comments on Twitter. In fact, both comments were taken from a Web site, www.oversharers.com, that the writer consulted as part of his research. One of the comments, from Claire, was from a Twitter feed; the other, from Deanna, was from Facebook. They were both written in 2010. The writer should not have implied he stumbled across them while reading recent Twitter feeds.

In other words, this esteemed NYT columnist has proven that among the billions upon billions of tweets and Facebook status updates out there, if you go searching, you might possibly be able to find two (well, one tweet and one Facebook status update) in which someone says something that a person totally unconnected to them might find uninteresting. Perhaps we can soon expect one of the NYT’s famed trend pieces, about how aging NYT columnists are now resorting to hacky, overdone premises, in which they misrepresent reality to try to make a point that doesn’t really make much sense.

Filed Under: journalism, roger cohen, social media