No music on Twitter?

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David Brooks is working hard to maintain his reputation for always being wrong about things that are easy to check:

Update — a few of the responses:

Some past LLOG coverage of David Brooks:

"David Brooks, Cognitive Neuroscientist", 6/12/2006
"David Brooks, Neuroendocrinologist", 9/17/2006
"David Brooks, Social Psychologist", 8/13/2008
"An inquiry concerning the principles of morals", 4/7/2009
"The butterfly and the elephant", 11/28/2009
"'Your passport has just been stamped for entry into the Land of Bullshit'", 3/3/2013
"David 'Semi True' Brooks", 3/20/2013
"Ngram morality", 5/22/2013
"Sloppiness and its enemies", 5/24/2013
"Pundit culture", 8/5.2013
"Reality v. Brooks", 6/15/2015
"Nouns, verbs, and ontological metaphors", 1/5/2017
"Ask Language Log: -ism exceptionalism", 2/12/2017
"Mid-voice crisis: Beyond active and passive", 8/5/2017
"Brooks on biological sexism", 8/13/2017
"Life, death, whatever", 12/1/2018



11 Comments

  1. Ellen K. said,

    April 18, 2020 @ 5:29 pm

    Looking at my Twitter feed, I don't see any mentions of music, going through lots of posts. BUT… played the first video (a sports video), with the sound turned on, and there's music.

    [(myl) But what you see in your feed depends on what you ask to see, who you follow, etc. So check out twitter searches for music or philharmonic or jazz, follow @YoYo_Ma or @pitchfork, or whatever, if you want more music in your feed. Or not, if you don't.]

  2. AntC said,

    April 18, 2020 @ 7:13 pm

    Even if it were true, so what? Does anybody "live their life on Twitter"? Hasn't Brooks heard of Youtube or TikTok or Instagram or Spotify or … They're just as easy to access as Twitter.

    Just as if you lived your life on the BBC Third Programme (as was) or 'Concert FM', you wouldn't know there was Pop music. So what?

    I do live my life on 'Concert FM' and serious news stations. I don't have an account on Twitter, because I have no interest in ignorant gobshites.

  3. unekdoud said,

    April 19, 2020 @ 1:57 am

    No, I mean real music. *puts on 10 hours of throat singing*

  4. Philip Taylor said,

    April 19, 2020 @ 6:10 am

    I confess that my sympathies lie more with AntC than with Mark on this occasion — if others feel that Twitter adds something to their lives, so be it, but as far as I am concerned the so-called "social media" have zero to offer with the possible (and very minor) exception of LinkedIn.

    There is some wonderful music on YouTube (almost anything by Voces8, for example, apart from their occasional foray into barber-shop), so why might someone need or want to seek it out on a platform such as Twitter ?

  5. Margaret H. said,

    April 19, 2020 @ 8:05 am

    Music-related topics trend worldwide basically every day on Twitter… what is he even talking about?

    [(myl) Indeed — the day of his "no music on twitter" tweet was the release date of Fiona Apple's widely-hailed new album, references to which trended on Twitter and are still frequent. The only explanation, I think, is that David Brooks needs to maintain his reputation for writing things that are false and easy to check…]

  6. bks said,

    April 20, 2020 @ 4:22 pm

    I checked and I find that Brooks is 58. He comes across as much older.

  7. ajay said,

    April 22, 2020 @ 9:13 am

    as far as I am concerned the so-called "social media" have zero to offer with the possible (and very minor) exception of LinkedIn.

    …he wrote, in a blog comment box.

  8. Thomas Lumley said,

    April 24, 2020 @ 1:18 am

    Angela Hewitt's on Twitter?

  9. Thomas Lumley said,

    April 24, 2020 @ 1:20 am

    Ok, that was modified by the comment system in a way that completely changed the meaning. So, I'll try again.

    I had "Angela Hewitt's on Twitter? [follows]", only with angle brackets instead of square brackets. The system ate the part in angle brackets.

  10. John Laviolette said,

    April 24, 2020 @ 2:27 pm

    I think the best way to interpret this is to assume that David Brooks is one of those people who treats all social media as write-only.

  11. btsfan said,

    April 25, 2020 @ 3:11 am

    BTS and the associated artist accounts have the highest engagement of any account on Twitter.

    David' probably knows that "If you lived your life on Twitter you would never know politics existed." is an absurd statement, but @BTS_twt is one of numerous accounts associated with a single band that gets an order of magnitude more engagement than literally any political account.

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