Ah, we should have known it was opinion piece fodder. Last week New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, who has tweeted all of 20 tweets since joining Twitter in 2009, wrote, “Twitter makes you stupid. Discuss.” It was trolling, and many picked up the bait; some of what ensued was lulzy.
Today, a piece by Keller in the New York Times Magazine which says roughly the same thing as his tweet, but with 1100 more words.
Starts out with understandable anxiety over introducing his 13-year-old daughter to Facebook (“I felt a little as if I had passed my child a pipe of crystal meth”), continues through “we are outsourcing our brains to the cloud,” and lauds various “internet makes us dumb” pundits as “digital Cassandras.”
Following an argument among the Twits is like listening to preschoolers quarreling: You did! Did not! Did too! Did not!
Was this man not on BBSes back in the 1980s? Concise bickering is not a proprietary feature of Twitter. Anyway, lord have mercy, don’t let him find 4Chan.
Have fun with it, commenters, if the paywall doesn’t block you from reading it.
“The Twitter Trap” (nytimes.com)
Update: Mat Honan at Gizmodo replies to Keller, in kind.
