Charles Apple

Michigan State infographics instructor Karl Gude and his family don’t make an appearance in a photo. But they’re all over the first few grafs of a story on page one of today’s New York Times:

That’s the story, stripped across the bottom. It’s about how technology has changed the morning habits of families — especially families with teenaged kids — as folks check messages and e-mail before eating breakfast, reading their newspapers or even speaking to each other.

Click for a larger view:

The Times‘ Brad Stone reports:

Karl and Dorsey Gude of East Lansing, Mich., can remember simpler mornings, not too long ago. They sat together and chatted as they ate breakfast. They read the newspaper and competed only with the television for the attention of their two teenage sons.

That was so last century. Today, Mr. Gude wakes at around 6 a.m. to check his work e-mail and his Facebook and Twitter accounts. The two boys, Cole and Erik, start each morning with text messages, video games and Facebook.

The new routine quickly became a source of conflict in the family, with Ms. Gude complaining that technology was eating into family time. But ultimately even she partially succumbed, cracking open her laptop after breakfast.

“Things that I thought were unacceptable a few years ago are now commonplace in my house,” she said, “like all four of us starting the day on four computers in four separate rooms.”

Karl commented this morning via Twitter:

The article is badly distorted. I told them that we had breakfast every morning and no tech until ready for school. He made it sound like we used to be the Cleavers and now we’re awful. One son got rid of Facebook and now prefers his guitar.

Karl will shortly begin his fourth year teaching at Michigan State. Previously, Karl was art director of Newsweek and, before that, the Associated Press. And, before that, United Press International.

Along the way, Karl worked for the legendary but doomed sports daily, The National, worked on a farm — ask him sometime to tell you the story about shooting a cow — and did all sorts of other fascinating things. Look here to find a big Q&A we did with him a couple of years ago.

Find the NYT story here.

Amusing side note: I stumbled across the story and blogged it here before I even got out of bed.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 7:16 am and is filed under Getting a life, New York Times, Visual Editors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.