Twitter is a ball-point pen, and this is the death of what exactly?

Some of you may have seen Maureen Dowd’s op-ed about Twitter in Tuesday’s New York Times.

Geoff Manaugh makes an excellent case for the other side of the story, In Defense of Twitter.

There are several chuckles in Manaugh’s post, amidst the more substantive arguments:

[W]ill Dowd soon also be writing an editorial that excoriates lonely teenagers for writing down their thoughts on paper? After all, she bizarrely implies, “high-school girls” shouldn’t be allowed access to new forms of writing technology, so she must have been apoplectic when cheap pens and affordable notebooks first arrived in the office supply store: suddenly anyone, even blonde girls, could be writers.

Read the article for yourself and let me know what you think.

12 Comments

  1. Anthony Pierre said:

    ME: Was there anything in your childhood that led you to want to destroy civilization as we know it?

    maureen dowd is my new hero.

    I am facebook friends with griff, I also follow him and logro on twitter. guess what? I get the same thing 3x. oh wait 4x, cause I subscribe to logro on google reader.

    The only thing good to come out of twitter recently was steve agee reading 7k names live on ustream.

    April 23, 2009
  2. Jerry Bilek said:

    I agree with Anthony. 98% of the stuff on twitter is junk. who has time to sort through that much trash to find a gem? I followed a couple of twitterers for a week. everything tweeted was available elsewhere, so I read it twice.
    I followed a couple of twitterers for a week. everything tweeted was available elsewhere, so I read it twice.

    April 23, 2009
  3. Patrick Enders said:

    Twitter could surely
    be put to far better use
    by tweeting Haiku.

    April 23, 2009
  4. Anthony Pierre said:

    griff is my hero
    he tweets multiple times now
    give it a rest man!

    April 23, 2009
  5. Tracy Davis said:

    Oh, you Luddites. Well, I tried.

    April 23, 2009
  6. Anthony Pierre said:

    do you really think twitter is a labor saving tech?

    and yes, if I had a sledgehammer I would smash that fail whale and twitter bird to bits.

    April 23, 2009
  7. Griff gave a training in Brainerd’s Library, and I told him about Maureen Dowd’s piece in Wednesday’s NYTimes Opinion Page. She was out in San Francisco and interviewed the two creators of Twitter, both in their 30s. She provided a “transcript” of what was said, after opening with her strong negative opinion of the phenomenon. The creators gave a very impressive response to her probing questions. The upshot was that Twitter can be very useful and helpful for communications. Or can be trivial – it’s up to the user.

    Remember the great expectations decades ago for educational television? PBS fulfills them today. Reality TV and “How I Met Your Mother”” do not.

    I have some Facebook friends and follow Dan Schorr on Twitter. Glad to read views from “Southern Community Internet” up here in Aitkin. Thanks, Griff. -Gord

    April 26, 2009
  8. Patrick Enders said:

    Finally, a good use for Twitter*:
    The complete works of Shakespeare, Twittered.

    For example:

    HV: Bad-ass Henry V kicks France’s
    butt with a rag-tag army, many
    long-bows, and excellent speeches.
    Henry then marries a French princess.

    AMND: A love potion straightens
    everything out and several couples end
    up happily together. Rustics are
    mocked. Watch out for fairies.

    H: Mommy issues are just the beginning
    for a prince with a murdered father
    and new Uncle/Step-dad. Most everybody
    ends up dead.

    http://opoyul.blogspot.com/2009/01/all-twittered-shakespeare-synopses.html

    *:I read it on a blog, via a link sent to me by email.

    April 29, 2009
  9. Jerry Bilek said:

    score one for the power of twitter. I’ll still not tweet though:
    http://www.velonews.com/article/97144

    Blockquote
    Armstrong’s Tweet turns out more than 1,000 riders for a jaunt around Dublin
    Blockquote

    August 27, 2009

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