George Packer Is Terrified By ‘Hellish’ Twitter

There is something sadly touching about this blog post from the New Yorker’s George Packer that went up over the weekend (and quickly proceeded to made the rounds on Twitter!). In it Packer, the uber-respected journalist and author who in addition to being a staff writer at the New Yorker pens a column at Mother Jones, confessed to feeling that Twitter was “is an image from information hell.”

The truth is, I feel like yelling Stop quite a bit these days. Every time I hear about Twitter I want to yell Stop. The notion of sending and getting brief updates to and from dozens or thousands of people every few minutes is an image from information hell.

Incidentally it was the New York Times‘ David Carr who put the Fear into him:

The most frightening picture of the future that I’ve read thus far in the new decade has nothing to do with terrorism or banking or the world’s water reserves—it’s an article by David Carr, the Times’s media critic, published on the decade’s first day, called “Why Twitter Will Endure.”…“There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on.”

This last is what really worries me. Who doesn’t want to be taken out of the boredom or sameness or pain of the present at any given moment? That’s what drugs are for, and that’s why people become addicted to them. Carr himself was once a crack addict (he wrote about it in “The Night of the Gun”). Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my son go hungry.

Also, Packer doesn’t have a Blackberry or iPhone. Which is charming in it’s own I prefer handwritten letters to emails, but which will likely not last that much longer (something he himself appears to recognize). Here’s the thing. I can sympathize with Packer’s desire to yell STOP. Absolutely. Who in any aspect of media doesn’t fantasize about the Internet being turned off. That said, boy would I ever like to see Packer on Twitter. I bet he’d be awesome.

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