ok the dangerous teenage hug epidemic - another important new york times trend piece

Also too old to use Facebook.

Old enough to play backgammon.

uh, the key word is stepson ... she? could be younger ...

people are going to have *widely* different reactions to a piece of writing like this, and honestly, i don't see what's so remarkable about that.

I feel like if you really hate the building, you should hate the individual bricks at least a little bit

xxp She's not. She's an old Alex with an older stepson. I can just feel it.

It's an Alex sense I have.

i dunno a better column might be like "she thinks she's too old but actually shitloads of old ppl use facebook" or "she thinks the site is overrun with mercenaries but actually they let over-40s download adblock too." like what's the point of letting her write about technology, even the social aspects of it, since she doesn't know any more about it than lots of poorly-informed people?

xp Alex: y'know Paul1ne Ol1veros is on facebook ...

xp A better column would have died stillborn in the writer's mind.

I am not on Facebook. Too old.

Also I heard it's not cool anymore.

My friend Walter told me that.

oh WAIT, Alex in SF, you are hating on the FRIEND?

that's been part of my confusion, cause you said:

How could someone write a paragraph like that and not think "I am the world's biggest douchebag"?

which reads like you're primarily hating on Heffernan for neutrally passing along the friend's tale (which you can do too, obviously)

He plays Risk Online now.

I like the paragraph that begins by describing the person as an eloquent writer, and then the quote isn't particularly eloquent.

can i be really really bitchy for a second and say that the thing i dislike the most about this column is that it begins with yet one more goddamn use of that Yeats quote?

xp nabisco: if that person were actually a friend, I wouldn't pass on the tale because it makes them look annoying.

can i get a cool planet invite?

heffernan's friend is dumb and heffernan seems to passively accept what she says as fact.

xp no dude cool planet disbanded iirc

does she even say how old these people are though?

No, but I'm guessing that a random sampling of her friends is mostly going to include people in her age group (she just turned 40).

uh, that's not that old ... half of my friends are in that age range ...

"which reads like you're primarily hating on Heffernan for neutrally passing along the friend's tale (which you can do too, obviously)"

It's the whole thing really. It's her friend, but also the way she's casually relating the whole thing. It just rubbed me the wrong way.

Blog post on Virginia Heffernan's wedding:
http://www.xtcian.com/arch/001618.php

uh, that's not that old ... half of my friends are in that age range ...

I never said it was. But it probably skews slightly old for Facebook.

That blog post makes me hate her even more.

bowtie guy is prob coolest guy on the planet
http://www.xtcian.com/RonJodiIan2VAWed(bl).jpg

slightly old for facebook doesn't seem to really matter anymore

That's her husband, isn't it?

xp alex (a few posts back) pretty much, yeah ... the whole thing reads like a hastily compiled list of reasons a few of the writer's friends quit facebook without any real point about generational differences, technological change, or interesting information

bowtie guy looks kinda familiar

I think bowtie guy is the author of the blog post.

actually - he looks like this douchey guy at my college who wore a suit every day to be "rebellious."

haha yeah okay see maybe this is my deeper issue: some woman gets an email from Heffernan asking why she quit Facebook -- she says oh, I joined cause my hip friend said it was awesome, but then the main application I liked got axed, someone called me old, my stepson got all Facebooked out, and eventually I was like screw it, I'll just play backgammon. this seems relatively normal and non-annoying to me, I guess; it seems like such a touchy bar for calling people out as annoying. I'm being way more annoying right now than that, just not in the Times.

since I'm being annoying I will add value with this actual screencap of "Alex"'s Facebook page and the REAL reason she quit:

http://emailsfromcrazypeople.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Q6umM-500x392.jpg

I just assumed it was David Samuels. Photo captioning sucks on that thing.

xp nabisco: the way you phrased it is far less annoying than the phrasing in the article ...

nabisco, this also might not be as big a deal if it weren't for the fact that the nyt has been fairly routinely making up fads lately and this fits into that pattern

xp - Alex - I doubt that's the douchey suit guy, he just looks like him.

Scrabulous didn't even disappear, it just became Lexulous instead (with the same app and stats even kept, as far as I can make out).

Oh, multipost.

You are right. David Samuels appears to have an eating disorder like his wife.

there were significant changes made when scrabulous became lexulous, at least for users in the USA.

Also the thing I think silly about this article is more things like

"Another friend, who didn’t want his name used, found that Facebook undermined his whole notion of online friendship. “It’s easy to think of your circle of ‘Friends’ as a coherent circle, clear and moated, when in fact the splay of overlap/network makes drip/action painting a better (visual) analogy.”"

OMG! Online friendships might not be quite like real ones! OMG I spend too much time online and it's full of ads and vapid!

Hello, 2001 called?

is the Bogus Trend Story thing really more prevalent at the Times, or does the Times just catch more public shit for them? (that's a serious non-rhetorical question.) like today the WSJ is getting it over an article about people cutting their own hair.

(I guess the Times's do tend to be more embarrassing, in our world, since they often have to do with trends of hipness or style)

wall street journal trend pieces tend to be WAY worse in my experience--i remember one from last winter about people who wear sneakers at the office--but i think they, uh, suffer from the subtle bigotry of low expectations

Probably because the Times is the most prominent "serious" paper in the country they get more shit about bogus trend stories ... the SF Chronicle definitely has its fair share ...

I do think it's getting more prevalent - and ilx isn't the only one noticing (http://www.slate.com/id/2225301/)

Whether the WSJ / other crappy newspapers do it more often than the Times doesn't particularly matter, and that certainly doesn't excuse the Times for doing it.

you get them in the UK, but they don't have this deadly serious capital-J journalism tone.

i think times just gets the most shit on ilx becuase its the only paper most of us read