According to Lev Grossman in TIME, Twitter does the Internet equivalent of splitting the atom. It creates a unit of content even smaller and more trivial than the individual blog entry. Lev warns to “expect the response to be suitably explosive”.
Like any good pusher, services like Twitter don’t answer existing needs; they create new ones and then fill them. They come to us wrapped in the rhetoric of interpersonal connection, creating a sense that our loved ones, or at least liked or tolerated ones, are electronically present to us, however far away they may be. But I can’t help wondering if we’re underestimating the countervailing effect: the cost we’re paying in our disconnection from our immediate surroundings, in our dependence on a continuous flow of electronic attention to prop up our egos, and above all, in a rising inability to be alone with our own thoughts–with that priceless stream of analog data that comes not from without but from within.
“Twitter also makes me nervous. It’s like the cocaine of blogging or e-mail but refined into crack. Internet addiction is an old story, but we’re on the tipping point of a new kind of problem that might more broadly be called an addiction to data, in all its many and splendiferous forms“. Grossman continues mentioning three reasons why data addiction will get worse:
One, mobile devices are getting better. As if BlackBerrys and Treos weren’t hard enough to put down, Apple will start selling the iPhone in June, and the new category of ultra-mini PCs like the FlipStart and the OQO2 is threatening to make computers as portable as cell phones. Two, wi-fi is becoming ubiquitous. Google and Earthlink have a deal in place to supply all of San Francisco with free wireless Internet access. Philadelphia, Anaheim, Calif., and Madison, Wis., already have it, as do dozens of other cities and towns. Within 10 years, most of urban and suburban America will be bathed in free wi-fi service. Airlines are expected to fire up in-flight wi-fi in the next 12 months.
And three, Internet CEOs have become obsessed with making cell-phone versions of everything we used to get on our desktops.
