A Little Cheating on ‘The Facebook Diet’

Very often I’ll write something that I think is perfectly clear, and be amazed by what readers take away from it. Sometimes this is educational for me, and helps me improve my work by discovering areas where my words were not as clear as I’d thought. (Typos! Sentences that sounded better in my head! Jokes that are only funny if you memorized all the insult-swordfighting from every Monkey Island game!) Other times a commenter will so thoroughly misinterpret what I’ve written, that I wonder if I’ve phrased something really poorly, or if the commenter is willfully misreading.

My review for Geek of The Facebook Diet was recently quoted by the publisher, which surprised me because I didn’t much like the book and I don’t think I left any question about that.

What was quoted:

A light-hearted giggle on how everyone’s addicted to Facebook.

Geek Magazine, Meg Stivison (Jan 31, 2013)

What I actually said, in the real piece for Geek Magazine:

Reading through the intro and the jokes, I couldn’t tell if the book is meant to be a light-hearted giggle on how everyone’s addicted to Facebook these days, and we’re meant to all recognize ourselves and our own habits in the cartoons, or if it’s meant to be denouncing kids today and their pointless internet socializing and how much better offline, “real” interactions would be. Either way, there’s unfortunately not a lot to relate to in the comics or jokes.

I mean, it’s not made up out of thin air, but I’m pretty sure this is not a good faith interpretation of what I wrote.