
The Times tech columnist ‘unplugged’ from the internet, except he didn’t - sqdbps
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-manjoo-nyt-unplug.php
======
danso
FWIW, his last 3,200 tweets (as pulled from the API) and a graph of his daily
tweeting rate:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nFHsiPWvYwUmopXWbx6T...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nFHsiPWvYwUmopXWbx6TbCyqvjI61aTR5QnCqirwdrs/edit#gid=1366541661)

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
Were any of the tweets automated?

~~~
Sir_Substance
My 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
Your 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.

------
montrose
I 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.

~~~
zoomly
This doesn't have anything to do with social media "addiction". It just shows
plainly how bad the NYT has gotten when even the simplest most trivially
checkable assertions of its reporters turn out to be slimy and weaselly. How
can you trust anything they write when things that you can verify turn out to
be "true" only with the most absurd definitions of "true"?

The NYT 20+ years ago wouldn't have let this happen and would have taken
action. The NYT of today isn't the same.

~~~
fny
I read both the Times and the WSJ for years now, and can say the opinion and
lifestyle pieces on both have chronically suffered from a lack of
“journalistic integrity”... because they’re intended to be biased from the get
go.

IMO, this has been a pretty consistent feature of lifestyle/opinion pieces
across the history of newspapers. It just used to be buried away in its proper
section. Unfortunately, these types of fluff/garbage pieces can “trend” and
blend in with proper journalism making you feel like they’re to be held to
some standard of journalism or science.

Unfortunately, people have a lot of difficulty distinguishing between the two,
which is probably why people consider things like conservative talk radio and
the Huffington Post and this lifestyle piece rigorous journalism.

~~~
tomp
There’s a difference between _being biased_ (= expressing your personal non-
objective opinion) and _lying_.

~~~
fny
I was just addressing OPs statement about paper quality as it has existed
across "rigorous" papers (conservative and liberal) for decades. Op-ed has
always been a steaming pile thats thankfully not reflective of the actual news
published.

As to your point, I agree completely--this guy just needs to be fired, and the
NYT should post a correction. He was a trusted writer who made false claims
about his own behavior.

Should the NYT have surveilled Manjoo's "experiment" for a fluff piece? Should
it monitor their writers to make sure they actually went and tried that new
cupcake place on 5th avenue?

Maybe. But I feel like the issue here is that this staff member blatantly lied
to both the paper and the public, which feels akin to a doctor violating his
hippocratic oath.

As for the rest of op-ed, I honestly feel like cherry-picking facts and
figures to form a one-sided opinion is tantamount to a lie--perhaps an even
more sinister one. And just like we don't have op-eds on Wikipedia, we should
be damn sure to isolate them from what we call "news."

------
tomtimtall
So 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.

~~~
matt4077
Is 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
How 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.

~~~
shaki-dora
The NYT is a stickler for traditions. Chief among them is a clear separation
of their business operations and the newsroom. I’m almost sure the best way to
get one of their writers to do A is to have a manager walk through the
newsroom and ask everybody not to do A.

This situation is a bit different because it’s not a reporter but a columnist.
Columnists don’t even work at a newspaper’s office- this one is in San
Francisco, a continent away from New York. They also don’t attend meetings.
There’s nothing to discuss about their job. They simply send in a text file
once a week and get a paycheck back.

~~~
tomtimtall
> The NYT is a stickler for traditions

You mean like fact checking? They didn’t even glance at the twitter account of
the man writing about how he ditched twitter. NYT isn’t what it was anymore.

~~~
nasredin
The profiles of Neonazis, weekly complaining about college kids protesting
hate speech, the "Cletus Safaris". Yeah NYT isn't what it was anymore.

Have you heard about The Most Ignorant Man in America. NYT got it covered.

They literally had to show up at the Whitehouse and sit on the couch and they
would have won their awards.

------
keithpeter
I 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...](https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/1/4279674/im-still-here-back-online-
after-a-year-without-the-internet)

~~~
John_KZ
Interesting 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.

~~~
hartator
That’s not true, people are more social now than before. Including in real
life.

~~~
908087
Sure, if you consider staring down at your phone in public a social activity.

------
mcguire
Money 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?

~~~
prepend
This 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
I'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.

~~~
danso
You and Manjoo are presenting a straw man. No one is accusing him of lying
about being disconnected from the Internet. The criticism is that he
explicitly used the word “unplugged” in relation to Twitter. Furthermore,
there’s a paragraph in which he describes what he didn’t give up — which
included podcasts and email newsletters. It takes an act of willful
obfuscation to not have added something about him checking Twitter throughout
the day. It doesn’t help his case that he tweeted news-related Twitter things,
such as telling people to read some thread about Sean Hannity.

------
xirdstl
I 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.

~~~
icebraining
Well, 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
> 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
Yes, 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).

------
danso
Worth 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".

------
chias
Reading 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.

~~~
shaki-dora
I 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.

~~~
chias
You're not wrong. I do, however, strongly believe that his use of the phrase
did not do him any favors.

------
cbhl
Can 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.

~~~
danso
Plenty 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-
medi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/reader-center/social-media-
guidelines.html)

\- 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-y...](https://gigaom.com/2014/09/29/does-it-matter-that-some-new-york-
times-editors-and-writers-dont-tweet-yes-and-no/)

------
gregorymichael
Unfortunate to see this kind of trivial doublespeak -- "What does unplugged
mean, really?" \-- from the purported paper of record.

~~~
UncleEntity
Virtue signaling is what the kids are calling it these days I believe.

~~~
shaki-dora
I 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”.

~~~
prepend
It’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-...](https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/02/people-who-accuse-
others-virtue-signalling-are-trying-stigmatise-empathy)

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?

~~~
detaro
> _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)._

But that's _not_ only what it is.

Originally, it meant any visible expression of virtue that's done with the
goal of signaling that to others (and thus increase social standing).

Nowadays, it's mostly used to criticize others actions as empty (e.g. someone
posting empty feel-good messages about an issue, but not doing anything to
actually help affected people), from both sides: criticizing people you agree
with for not actually doing anything to help the cause they claim to support,
or for denigrating people's efforts as being done purely to improve their
standing, not because they actually care about it.

If someone accuses you of virtue signaling, they accuse you of only wanting to
look good, not actually supporting something you publicly represent.

It kind of seems fair to claim that the author espousing the benefits of
unplugging while not actually doing it is virtue signaling. The problem is, it
can be applied even if they did that: Oh you actually didn't tweet for a
month? Well, you only did that so you could claim moral superiority over
everyone else because it's fashionable to argue against social media. And
surely you were _looking_ at Twitter all the time and just didn't want to
break appearances. That's the insidious part about how it's sometimes used
nowadays: even if you _did_ do something "good", it's devalued because it's
implied you didn't mean it, and why it causes offense.

(E.g. I can take your post
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16564343](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16564343)
and from a position that agrees with you accuse you of virtue signaling since
you only post it here on HN and aren't doing anything to fix it, e.g. writing
an angry letter to the editor, so all it did was show others that you don't
agree. Or I can accuse you of virtue signaling from a position disagreeing,
since it's obvious that HN would like this argument and you are just saying it
to get more Karma and social respect from the stupid masses here, not because
you _actually_ care about something so preposterous. The term is pretty much
poisoned, especially by the latter use, which is almost impossible to defend
against.)

~~~
prepend
Your example with my link was really helpful. I think it’s hard to rule in or
out without some objective measure. I could show if I wrote a letter to the
editor (which I didn’t) but it would be hard or impossible for me to verify.

Plus the behavior change would be hard for you to measure since I basically
just spend more time vetting articles from NYTimes. Theoretically, it would
reduce my likelihood to share news from that source, but I rarely share items
anyway.

So the term isn’t very useful to me other than just filtering out people who
use it. But I would be interested in discounting priority of people who do
actually virtue signal since their content is less likely to be useful to me.

------
jancsika
> 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?

------
ramzyo
I 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
“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
Interesting 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.

------
eggy
I 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.

------
icebraining
I don't really give a damn about the issue, but I want to thank the author for
showing me the word "avuncular".

------
EtDybNuvCu
The article doesn't render with JS disabled, but does render in Firefox's
reader mode.

~~~
falcolas
I 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
It's all about user engagement... In that a lot of websites don't want users
to apparently engage with content

------
crawfordcomeaux
This 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.

------
notananthem
Good article.

