Cancel my subscription to the resurrection
Seth Schiesel in the New York Times (All Together Now: Play the Game, Mom):
Previous titles in the Rock Band and Guitar Hero series have already done more in recent years to introduce young people to classic rock than all the radio stations in the country.*
Um, are there any statistics to back up this claim? I mean, maybe it's true, but how do you know?
h/t Tom Ewing (as usual)
Of course, this blank assertion doesn't come close to the audacity of a claim I remember from one of the prominent photojournalist magazines (Look or Life or the Saturday Evening Post) in 1967, where they quoted some dude - made it a pull quote! - saying that a couple of stanzas in the Doors' "When The Music's Over" would do more to protect the environment than the entirety of Lady Bird Johnson's Keep America Beautiful campaign. (The stanzas in question: "What have they done to the Earth?/What have they done to our fair sister?/Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her/Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn/And tied her with fences/And dragged her down/I hear a very gentle sound/With your ear down to the ground/We want the world and we want it.../Now/Now?/NOW!")
But more important than Rock Band to today's New York Times readers is the fact that someone told someone else that she was quitting Facebook! The most emailed story of the day is last week's Virginia Heffernan column in which she tells us:
Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you'll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.
The exodus is not evident from the site's overall numbers. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July. But while people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing - some of them ostentatiously.
Well, if the exodus is not evident from the site's overall numbers, then maybe it's not an exodus. Sure, perhaps it's worth noting that some people are quitting, if one adds such caveats as "I don't know if this is a harbinger or normal turnover, or maybe it signals a shift in demographics; in any event someone could check this out more systematically, to see." I mean, it's possible Heffernan has a feel for things, an eye for canaries. I once posted here, on the basis of several kids from different social sets in different towns all ridiculing emos or being ridiculed for being emo, that whether or not you were emo was becoming crucial to a whole bunch of teenagers. And maybe I was all wrong and should have thrown in qualifiers and caveats and such about the small and unrepresentative nature of my sample, but teens I knew hadn't been talking emo the year before whereas people quit social media sites all the time.
I don't normally trawl the Web just to find stupidity, but not only did these two items hit me within two minutes of each other, but Tom's posts on Blue Lines Revisited, Blackbeard Blog, and Only Connect have been alerting me to the continual presence of such questionable claims anyway. I'd just been reading a post he'd linked by Simon Kendrick in which Kendrick ranked the invalidity of surveys: "Made up data. Straw poll of close friends. Accumulating opinion from one source (e.g. comments from one news story). PR survey. Hypothesis testing survey. Exploratory survey. Census."
So I read three related things in a row: clearly a trend!
*Note how Ann Powers, whose Beatles piece I was criticizing a couple of days ago, nonetheless was actually trying to, you know, think, ask herself what story the game was telling, and what impact that story might have; while for this guy the story is a given, so that he can tell another one, about how the Beatles will bring us together as they never have before.
Previous titles in the Rock Band and Guitar Hero series have already done more in recent years to introduce young people to classic rock than all the radio stations in the country.*
Um, are there any statistics to back up this claim? I mean, maybe it's true, but how do you know?
h/t Tom Ewing (as usual)
Of course, this blank assertion doesn't come close to the audacity of a claim I remember from one of the prominent photojournalist magazines (Look or Life or the Saturday Evening Post) in 1967, where they quoted some dude - made it a pull quote! - saying that a couple of stanzas in the Doors' "When The Music's Over" would do more to protect the environment than the entirety of Lady Bird Johnson's Keep America Beautiful campaign. (The stanzas in question: "What have they done to the Earth?/What have they done to our fair sister?/Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her/Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn/And tied her with fences/And dragged her down/I hear a very gentle sound/With your ear down to the ground/We want the world and we want it.../Now/Now?/NOW!")
But more important than Rock Band to today's New York Times readers is the fact that someone told someone else that she was quitting Facebook! The most emailed story of the day is last week's Virginia Heffernan column in which she tells us:
Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you'll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.
The exodus is not evident from the site's overall numbers. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July. But while people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing - some of them ostentatiously.
Well, if the exodus is not evident from the site's overall numbers, then maybe it's not an exodus. Sure, perhaps it's worth noting that some people are quitting, if one adds such caveats as "I don't know if this is a harbinger or normal turnover, or maybe it signals a shift in demographics; in any event someone could check this out more systematically, to see." I mean, it's possible Heffernan has a feel for things, an eye for canaries. I once posted here, on the basis of several kids from different social sets in different towns all ridiculing emos or being ridiculed for being emo, that whether or not you were emo was becoming crucial to a whole bunch of teenagers. And maybe I was all wrong and should have thrown in qualifiers and caveats and such about the small and unrepresentative nature of my sample, but teens I knew hadn't been talking emo the year before whereas people quit social media sites all the time.
I don't normally trawl the Web just to find stupidity, but not only did these two items hit me within two minutes of each other, but Tom's posts on Blue Lines Revisited, Blackbeard Blog, and Only Connect have been alerting me to the continual presence of such questionable claims anyway. I'd just been reading a post he'd linked by Simon Kendrick in which Kendrick ranked the invalidity of surveys: "Made up data. Straw poll of close friends. Accumulating opinion from one source (e.g. comments from one news story). PR survey. Hypothesis testing survey. Exploratory survey. Census."
So I read three related things in a row: clearly a trend!
*Note how Ann Powers, whose Beatles piece I was criticizing a couple of days ago, nonetheless was actually trying to, you know, think, ask herself what story the game was telling, and what impact that story might have; while for this guy the story is a given, so that he can tell another one, about how the Beatles will bring us together as they never have before.