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

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

and yeah the chron does it like crazy, but it also doesn't have a great reputation anymore. the nyt is still taken seriously, but if they don't put a lid on this stuff, it's gonna hurt their rep in the long term. this is the 2nd most read article on nyt.com.

this is the 2nd most read article on nyt.com.

You realize this is why they keep publishing them, right?

right, well if the nyt wants to aim for page hits above uh, fact-based articles, they can do a lot better than this

they're usually spottable insofar as their tone's just weaselly and anecdotal and question-filled, like "could these uncertain indicators and observations maybe suggest that possibly X? Bob Abernathy thinks so, though he admits that statistics are vague; here is an interesting story about some guy that does X and says all his friends do too"

(the Heffernan absolutely does that, but I've always felt like a magazine column is the main spot that's acceptable)

in the print copy, it's pretty obv that there's a difference between the magazine and the newspaper, but the website doesn't particularly highlight that difference. I mean, it says 'magazine' on top, but I imagine 50% of the people who read this don't even know what the nyt magazine refers to.

but I imagine 50% of the people who read this don't even know what the nyt magazine refers to.

You don't?

http://www.xtcian.com/RonJodiIan2VAWed(bl).jpg

The walls between realities must be getting thin, bowtie guy is clearly alt-world Greg Kinnear.

Ladies and gentlemen

In her debut column, Virginia Heffernan writes about a series that explores both coal-mining narratives and reality TV.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/mining-reality/

Welcome Back Virginia! A wonderful writer that truly understands the digital culture as well as the pop one, i followed 'Screens' & 'The Medium' , and was pleased to see your pic and news of this 'debut' column. Your voice has been missed in it's own space.

Perhaps the paywall went up so these people, including commenters, could be more readily isolated and contained.

this seems vaguely relevant here

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/lifestyle/the-other-side/william-duncan-state-school-bans-children-from-rolling-up-sleeves-on-jumpers/story-e6frfhk6-1226107452535

amazing picture with that story