In science, the weight of the references that one can cite helps to enforce the strength of one's point. In particular, the idea is to find the oldest valid accounts that resonate with the theme. THerefore it's quite funny to read an account of how Mark Twain thought that the appearance of the telephone would produce a nation of idiots. His inimitable recounting of the first conversation he heard as an aural observer meshes well with the feeling we have today when confronted with someone on an ear-bud phone, apparently talking to himself.

Going back further, Socrates was convinced that the advent of writing would doom the world to a state of inarticulate analytical paralysis. Debate, in his view, was key to honing an argument and therefore writing about one's own thoughts was no more than self-indulgent nonsense.

So, the current chest-beating pronouncements about Twittering Twits and Google-eyed morons is nothing new. The "resolution" is not new either. If a technology serves a productive purpose, it will survive and if it doesn't, it won't. Personally, I think Twitter has the makings of a fad and certainly would not have emerged except by piggybacking on the spread of hand-held, multifunction phones. Texting, in general, is a more useful utility and is probably here to stay.

It's all about knowing when to unplug. Recent fMRI studies show that students who think that they are master multi-taskers have not, indeed, undergone some sudden evolutionary spurt that separates them from previous generations. Conscious focus can really only land on one input stream at a time and there is no way around it. If you add too much noise into the input, nothing coherent will stick (like actually learning anything in a class lecture). And Socrates was certainly right in the sense that we humans need to talk to other humans (preferably face-to-face) in order to really grow in the way we view the world.