Thomas Friedman Has No Clue About The Internet

Newly liberated from the for-fee "TimesSelect" straitjacket, Thomas Friedman today reminds us why he never met a generalization he couldn't inflate into a 700-word column. The New York Times gasbag has toured four (4!) U.S. college campuses and concluded that the undergrads, while admirable in many ways, are "too quiet, too online, for [their] own good."This is so clueless on so many levels it's hard to know where to start. For one thing Friedman, referred to Choire Sicha of Gawker as a "globe-trotting taker of conclusions from anecdotes," arrives at his headline-font insights from visits to four universities, including the University of Mississippi and Williams. Now, I was born in Jackson, Miss., and I spent many a hazy evening wandering around Williams, Mass., in my own undergrad days, and I can tell you that one thing the denizens of Ole Miss and of Williams are not is typical. Friedman, who reports students of Generation Q (for "Quiet" -- get it?) "going abroad to build homes for the poor in El Salvador in record numbers or volunteering at AIDS clinics in record numbers" without specifying any numbers, long ago forgot what real reporting looks like.

Secondly, he equates "online" with "quiet." I don't know about you, but when I'm surfing around YouTube looking for bootleg videos of Snow Patrol in concert, "quiet" is not the word that comes to mind. Cacophonous, disorderly, logorrheic, maybe; quiet, hardly. Friedman makes the classic oldsters' mistake of mistaking the form of communication for its content.

"Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn't change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms," Friedman pronounces in his billboard prose style. Actually, I think MLK and RFK probably would have loved to be able to spread the word via Facebook, Twitter, and IM.

Quick world-affairs pop quiz: Which has had the most powerful effect on political and social life in the People's Republic of China (one of Friedman's old stomping grounds): a) the Tiananmen protests of 1989 b) the explosion of online access since then

Friedman should stick to what he knows: writing book chapters that trumpet his foregone conclusions, based on airplane conversations.