Pace Chris Clarke, I don’t think the biggest problem with Twitter is that there’s no conceivable way it could ever be useful, nor that there’s nothing of value to be said in 140 characters (I had thought of the haiku angle myself). It’s that it’s just the latest manifestation of the mindless, zombie lurching toward speed and simplicity for their own sake. Frankly, I don’t want to live in a world where blogs and emails are considered too time-and-labor intensive for both the author and the reader.
Granted, it often is annoying to read the sort of shorthand that Twitter enables, but as with text messages, that in itself isn’t a herald of the new Dark Ages or anything. It’s the bizarre spectacle of people who are utterly convinced that they need to save more time and effort without seeming to have the slightest idea of why they’re saving it, or what they’re going to do with it besides cram it full of more trivia and frenetic activity. What have we done with all the time we’ve saved in the last fifteen years or so, since the Internet became part of our daily lives?