@nytkeller tweets "#TwitterMakesYouStupid. discuss." And Twitter does.
New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller bashes Twitter...on Twitter. And Twitter doesn't exactly approve.
- Update (May 18): In a column entitled "The Twitter Trap," scheduled to run in The New York Times Magazine on May 22, Keller refers to his #TwitterMakesYouStupid tweet as "a kind of masochistic experiment."
He also, interestingly enough, divides the responses to his tweet into several categories, as I did in this piece. He writes:
"It produced a few flashes of wit ('Give a little credit to our public
schools!'); a couple of earnestly obvious points ('Depends who you follow'); some understandable speculation that my account had been hacked by a troll; a message from my wife ('I don’t know if Twitter makes you stupid, but it’s making you late for dinner. Come home!'); and an awful lot of nyah-nyah-nyah ('Um, wrong.' 'Nuh-uh!!')."
The real kicker, however, is this line:
"Almost everyone who had anything profound to say in response to my little provocation chose to say it outside Twitter."
The gist of the column is that Keller is a man who has still has many reservations about social media, even while he runs a newspaper that takes advantage of it.
"The shortcomings of social media would not bother me awfully if I did not suspect that Facebook friendship and Twitter chatter are displacing real rapport and real conversation, just as Gutenberg’s device displaced remembering. The things we may be unlearning, tweet by tweet — complexity, acuity, patience, wisdom, intimacy — are things that matter."
Again, Keller's piece - which fails to mention this awesome Storify (or its author, for that matter) - can be read here.Original (May 11): On Wednesday, May 11, at approximately 4:55 p.m., Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, tweeted the following.
Keller, who has over 18,000 followers despite having only tweeted 19 times, has managed to get quite a bit of feedback.
- I've organized them into a few categories.
- 1) The Bill-Killer-Just-Got-Hacked Conspiracy Theory
Bill Keller's account has no previous history of being hacked, although his wife has commandeered it in the past. From Keller's March 10 column in The Times:
"Recently my sleepless wife sent out a midnight Twitter post — “Insomnia. Who else is awake?”
— but she inadvertently sent it on my Twitter account rather than her
own, prompting a global Twitter forum on my state of mind."
Anyway, the NYT's social media editor soon shot the hacked theory down.- So let's move on...
2) Meta
- 3) Humor
- 4) Polite Disagreement
