Price of cutting yourself off social media

There was quite the buzz last week about a New York Times piece by one Farhad Manjoo, in which he said he’d given up on social media for a couple of months, relying instead for his news on three newspapers delivered daily (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and his local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle).

At one level, this was an attractive proposition, particularly the way Manjoo framed it: “Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulletins.”

Inevitably nitpickers swarmed out of — I want to say nests? Eeyries? — nowhere to point out that Manjoo had been on Twitter, in fact, during this period, so how could he possibly be claiming . . . well, you can guess where that went. How would that work in sport, though, this kind of digital deprivation?