NYT’s Exec Editor Bill Keller: Using Twitter Makes You Stupid

by Alex Alvarez | 1:10 pm, May 18th, 2011

» 15 comments

Bill Keller, New York Times executive editor and, like, world’s strictest dad ever, took to the paper to vent a bit about Twitter and other forms of social media. Keller doesn’t like Twitter too much, it seems. You see, he and his wife – who is herself an avid Twitter user – just permitted their 13-year-old daughter to open her own Facebook account, much to Keller’s personal dismay. Keller wonders whether the toll we pay for so much access to one another online, and to many time and energy-saving applications found on the internet, ultimately ends up being a piece of ourselves. Heavy:

My father, who was trained in engineering at M.I.T. in the slide-rule era, often lamented the way the pocket calculator, for all its convenience, diminished my generation’s math skills. Many of us have discovered that navigating by G.P.S. has undermined our mastery of city streets and perhaps even impaired our innate sense of direction. Typing pretty much killed penmanship. Twitter and YouTube are nibbling away at our attention spans. And what little memory we had not already surrendered to Gutenberg we have relinquished to Google. Why remember what you can look up in seconds?

Robert Bjork, who studies memory and learning at U.C.L.A., has noticed that even very smart students, conversant in the Excel spreadsheet, don’t pick up patterns in data that would be evident if they had not let the program do so much of the work.

Keller isn’t too convinced that many of today’s social media outlets are “social” so much as noisy distractions keeping us from spending time on other pursuits, like our work and one another. Although a virtual fireplace isn’t too bad of a place in front of which to read your digital subscription to the New York Times.

Of course, a story on social media written by the NYT‘s executive editor is going to garner quite a bit of attention on – You guessed it! – Twitter. Here’s what some in the media are saying about Keller’s op-ed piece:

Anthony De Rosa, of Reuters and Neighborhoodr

and

The Daily’s Hunter Walker

Gawker’s Adrian Chen

With Keller’s increased propensity to use his column as a way to bash new means of sharing news, modern methods of keeping in touch with people all over the world, and his online competitors, we can’t help but wonder: Is Keller’s column a bad move for the Times – or is any Twitter buzz good Twitter buzz?

h/t NYT

Bill Keller, Facebook, New York Times, social media, twitter

SnowSoul

This explains why he has an account with twitter.
http://www.swissarmyjew.com Keeva

Sounds like a person jealous that his newspaper is losing readers faster than a colander loses water.
Color Me Badd

Reading the NYT made me stupid, I hope Keller and all the other dopes at the NYT are sending out resumes.
Pablo

Maybe it’s the internet that makes you stupid. Or maybe it’s the New York Times that’s stupid, despite it’s time traveling abilities.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 22, 2011, on page MM11 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: THE TWITTER TRAP.

Keller is a tortured soul.
Zandandido

…. And he says this on twitter? Bill Keller is the idiot. What freaking doofus says “*Thing* makes you stupid” while you are using the thing you say is stupid! This is why The New York Times has been losing subscriptions and readers for a while now. Their leader is a complete airhead.
Liberal Tormentor

Color Me Ignorant says:
Reading the NYT made me stupid

Don’t blame them, you were born that way.
Barack Must Go

This is terrible news for those poor schmuck libs (mostly the hipsters and stoners ) who are already almost blind from ____ off so much, now their dumber than a piece of driftwood too.
Color Me Badd

He is throwing a public temper tantrum, because his irrelevant rag of a newspaper is about to become a memory and the large reason for it is the independent media and social networking sites, and really it is his own fault for not learning to adapt. Blame yourself Bill, I know you are reading this.
Zandandido

Color Me Badd said:
He is throwing a public temper tantrum, because his irrelevant rag of a newspaper is about to become a memory and the large reason for it is the independent media and social networking sites, and really it is his own fault for not learning to adapt. Blame yourself Bill, I know you are reading this.

Of course he reads this, while still saying “reading blogs makes you stupid”.
felixw

Nothing the Left hates more than open forums for free speech that can’t be controlled from above — Twitter, talk radio, town hall meetings, etc. The Left always prefers one-way communication — the lectern in the college classroom, network TV news. the New York Times, etc. Their ideal, as Mr. Keller makes eminently clear, is a society in which they can purify, filter and censor stories before anyone gets to hear them. In fact that little description sums up the history of the New York Times.

Twitter and other open forums are a threat to this totalitarian ideal. Just watch, you will see the Times become more and more confrontational with regard to social media. The recent NY Times paywall fiasco was just an opening gambit in a lengthy war. One which the NY Times will lose. That’s an easy prediction to make. Just watch and see….
bobuda

Correction: Reading the NYT makes you stupid.
J Baustian

SnowSoul said:
This explains why he has an account with twitter.

Oh, come on, Keller was an idiot long before he got a Twitter account.

Twitter might make idiots of others, but Keller does not have this excuse.
BarneyFranken

#TheNewYorkTimesMakesYouaPompousAss.
Mas Liberty5

Twitter is pretty stupid.
Anonymous

An
interesting discussion is worth comment. I think that you should write more on
this topic, it might not be a taboo subject but generally people are not enough
to speak on such topics. To the next. Cheers