Twitter = the Devil

Steve O'Hear, at ZDnet, has an interesting little tidbit on Twitter as social phenomenon. For the uninitiated, Steve has a good definition of Twitter:

"Twitter is an SMS, IM and web messaging service for groups of friends, which at its most basic invites users — in near real time — to answer the question: what are you doing, right now? The results of which are then broadcast to a user's social network via SMS or IM, and posted to their Twitter micro-blog."

Sure, sounds kind neat - and is one of thost "why-didn't-I-think-of-that-first" type things (I had that with Pandora when I first started using it). However, as cool as Twitter sounds, my first impression is that it's a great idea but it caters (as do most other things these days) to not only extending the publics' ADD, but creating a next generation of children/students/employees/government officials with a severe limitation on their ability to sustain a consistent thought for more than 30 seconds. I already see it at restaurants and coffee shops, and even in places that require actual thought like libraries and during moves: people constantly checking their phones for IMs or their Blackberries/Smartphones for missed called and/or emails (or IMs or SMS or any/everything else). 

I already have a fear that my son and daughter will not get the visceral experience of going to a library - especially a university library - as libraries will eventually go the way of the Dodo. Now I fear that I won't be able to sustain a conversation with them - face to face - for longer than 30 seconds at a time. What with the constant fear of sickness, abduction, accident, global warming, continued exposure to Rosie O'Donell I have enough to worry about. I don't need technology adding to my stress level.

UPDATE: Found this article by Linda Stone on "continuous partial attention". While not necessarily saying that newer technologies contribut to ADD, the idea of  being "so accessible, we're inaccessible" is just as frightening. What happens to interpersonal skills if all (or the majority of) communication is done via IM, SMS and/or chat?