Result from an image search I did for hypocrisy. Makes sense to me. "Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable," the New York Times ordered me this weekend. Facebook can do no such thing since I bravely deleted my account in 2013. Even still, I have a patrician disdain for social media, so was hoping to enjoy some schadenfreude over the world I left behind and its many mindless prisoners. Alas…
The premise of Seth Stephens-Davidowitz's article is simple: we don't live lives that are quite as exciting as we portray them on social media. The problem is he turns every piece of data into evidence of this phenomenon. Here are three examples that serve, for him, as proof of our hypocrisy:
1. "In the real world, The National Enquirer, a weekly, sells nearly three times as many copies as The Atlantic, a monthly, every year. On Facebook, The Atlantic is 45 times more popular."
2. "Americans spend about six times as much of their time cleaning dishes as they do golfing. But there are roughly twice as many tweets reporting golfing as there are tweets reporting doing the dishes."
3. "Owners of luxury cars like BMWs and Mercedeses are about two and a half times as likely to announce their affiliation on Facebook as are owners of ordinary makes and models."
Try to find the flaws those stats. In the meantime, I will relate that Stephens-Davidowitz "actually spent the past five years" unearthing them. Now, let's bitch about the above and explore why they do not support his brief.
The premise of Seth Stephens-Davidowitz's article is simple: we don't live lives that are quite as exciting as we portray them on social media. The problem is he turns every piece of data into evidence of this phenomenon. Here are three examples that serve, for him, as proof of our hypocrisy:
1. "In the real world, The National Enquirer, a weekly, sells nearly three times as many copies as The Atlantic, a monthly, every year. On Facebook, The Atlantic is 45 times more popular."
2. "Americans spend about six times as much of their time cleaning dishes as they do golfing. But there are roughly twice as many tweets reporting golfing as there are tweets reporting doing the dishes."
3. "Owners of luxury cars like BMWs and Mercedeses are about two and a half times as likely to announce their affiliation on Facebook as are owners of ordinary makes and models."
Try to find the flaws those stats. In the meantime, I will relate that Stephens-Davidowitz "actually spent the past five years" unearthing them. Now, let's bitch about the above and explore why they do not support his brief.
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