Farhad Manjoo Unplugged From the Internet for His News Apart From in All of the Ways He Didn’t ⇥ cjr.org

Farhad Manjoo, New York Times:

This has been my life for nearly two months. In January, after the breaking-newsiest year in recent memory, I decided to travel back in time. I turned off my digital news notifications, unplugged from Twitter and other social networks, and subscribed to home delivery of three print newspapers — The Times, The Wall Street Journal and my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle — plus a weekly newsmagazine, The Economist.

Dan Mitchell, Columbia Journalism Review:

But he didn’t really unplug from social media at all. The evidence is right there in his Twitter feed, just below where he tweeted out his column: Manjoo remained a daily, active Twitter user throughout the two months he claims to have gone cold turkey, tweeting many hundreds of times, perhaps more than 1,000. In an email interview on Thursday, he stuck to his story, essentially arguing that the gist of what he wrote remains true, despite the tweets throughout his self-imposed hiatus.

The biggest problem with Manjoo’s piece is that it is framed as “unplugging” from social media, when it’s really just a reduction in using it as a primary source for news. It’s more subtle and makes for a way less interesting headline, but it’s more honest.

By the way, I find the entire genre of tech writers writing about not using technology so trite. Beyond that, it’s 2018 — telling people not to follow news accounts on Twitter is just yelling into the wind. Want a few tips for reading the news? Here are four things I try to do, for whatever it’s worth:

  • Resist the urge to react immediately.

  • Resist the urge to refresh feeds and news sources when bored. News will happen regardless.

  • During a breaking news event, nothing makes sense to anyone, so keep that in mind when reading the first wave of reporting on it.

  • Twitter threads tend to be tedious and unnecessary.

Maybe those tips will be useful to you; maybe they won’t. Maybe they’re things you do already without thinking about it. But at least you didn’t have to pretend to stop using Twitter for two months to figure it out.