Trends in journalism
The Worst NYT Trend Story of the Year?:
Here’s an early autumnal contender: Virginia Heffernan’s entirely anecdotal story about a massive Facebook Exodus. How serious is this Facebook exodus? Heffernan explains:
The exodus is not evident from the site’s overall numbers.The exodus is not evident from the site’s overall numbers! Some trend!
This is a serious problem. Anecdotes add spice to real data. As illustrations of something real. Too often journalism involves finding five people on the street who can agree with whatever “trend” you’ve made up. This reminds of how I was taught to write essays in Middle School, make up a thesis and find n facts to support the thesis. Who cares if those facts are representative of the distribution of facts in the real world! You got your thesis and you know what you are looking for. And secondarily, there is the problem of trends are so widely accepted as to become background assumptions, but which turn out to be false upon even cursory examination.
You overstate your conclusion. The author’s thesis is the following:
“But while people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing ? some of them ostentatiously.”
Trivial, yes, but not untrue.
Virginia Heffernan is not a news reporter; she’s a columnist. Columnists often write about the implications of their personal experiences, and if they are very lucky they find that they saw early signs of what does turn out to be a statistically important trend. (I was an editorial writer and columnist for nearly 20 years, and I was lucky once or twice.)
Journalism has many genres, and it’s bootless to criticize someone for writing in the wrong genre.
If she’d pretended her friends were random selections, and you’d found they weren’t (which happens fairly frequently in MSM coverage of political events) you’d have a point. But she didn’t.
Oh, that was not her thesis — it’s trivial, as you say. Her real thesis is that it’s an “exodus,” which would be newsworthy (if true). I’m going to copy a comment I left at 2blowhards about this stupid column (even if it were a real exodus among her peers, it misses the point of who Facebook is for):
Facebook is a social network site for people who have a social life — that is, lots of inter-personal drama that they are required to constantly keep the pulse of.
Therefore, it is not designed for anyone over 30, as they largely lack social drama in their lives, at least compared to their adolescence and young adulthood (for which they are grateful). And it is only somewhat useful for those between 25 and 30.
Mostly it is for high schoolers, college students, and those who are wasting their first few years after college “finding themselves.” These are the social environments that are volatile and high-pressure enough to require you to continually stay abreast of what’s going on. When social life becomes calm, there’s not much news to check up on.
The idea that a 40 year-old NYT columnist and her 40-something peers constitute an “exodus” is risible. They simply figured out that their social lives are too boring to have to constantly check Facebook to see what’s up.
The fact that some people are “ostentatiously” quitting Facebook is a sign of Facebook’s influence. Does anyone make a big deal about quitting Live Journal or Friendster?
Actually yes in the case of LiveJournal. Some LJers recently created a clone/rival, DreamWidth, and there was some degree of drama about people swapping over.
Jack Schafer at Slate pretty regularly mocks the media for making up trends based on nothing. This seems to be par for the course.
“This reminds of how I was taught to write essays in Middle School, make up a thesis and find n facts to support the thesis. Who cares if those facts are representative of the distribution of facts in the real world! You got your thesis and you know what you are looking for.”
Ha, so true. I never could find the info I needed after I “narrowed” the topic to something interesting. If I had had internet access as a middle school student, I never would have slept till exhaustion overwhelmed me. The ability to instantly gratify insatiable curiosity would have been far too tempting.
“Too often journalism involves finding five people on the street who can agree with whatever “trend” you’ve made up.”
Here’s a great example of this I saw recently: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8039744.stm
The article begins: “Couples who have split up and want to go their separate ways are increasingly being forced to live apart under the same roof by a lack of movement in the housing market.”
But the whole of the rest of the article is about Ben and Gemma’s predicament – there isn’t the slightest evidence that their experience is common!