The Twitter Train: George Packer Responds - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

A timely and important debate

Ah, the reverberating beauty of the Internet.

David Carr, media critic at The New York Times, wrote about Twitter, and how it was here to stay. George Packer, a writer for The New Yorker, responded to Mr. Carr’s piece, saying that Twitter was his idea of “information hell.”

Mr. Packer’s piece touched a nerve with me for a number of reasons, so I wrote a response, trying to point out that there are many positive elements to Twitter.

On Thursday, Mr. Packer offered a rebuttal. In it, he elaborates on his reasons for avoiding Twitter and similar services, including his belief that they exact a “high price in available time, attention span, reading comprehension, and experience of the immediately surrounding world.”

Discussions like these are a healthy part of a democracy and our future — whether or not you use Twitter.

An excerpt from the rebuttal (with formatting blocked and URL added by The New Yorker site, upon copy/paste) :

It’s true that I hadn’t used Twitter (not consciously, anyway—my editors inform me that this blog has for some time had an automated Twitter feed). I haven’t used crack, either, but—as a Bilton reader pointed out—you don’t need to do the drug to understand the effects. One is the sight of adults walking into traffic with their eyes glued to their iPhones, or dividing their attention about evenly between their lunch partner and their BlackBerry. Here’s another: Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic’s very good politics blogger, was asked by Michael Kinsley to describe his typical day of information consumption, otherwise known as reading. Ambinder’s day begins and ends with Twitter, and there’s plenty of Twitter in between. No mention of books, except as vacation material via the Kindle.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2010/02/neither-luddite-nor-biltonite.html#ixzz0el4Ddk0c

The Twitter Train: George Packer Responds - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com