I’ve never much cared for Dooce (Heather Armstrong) or her writing. It all seemed too manufactured, too curated specifically to appear un-curated. And it all seemed completely faux-spontaneous to me. It was like reading about someone’s life with anything interesting sanitized out. Why people found it fascinating I can’t guess. Mundanity appeals to the mundane. Or perhaps it’s just not my thing.

However what she writes here is I think true.

Attentions spans are now 140 characters long, sometimes as short as a video or a picture that self destructs in a few seconds. I have stood in a line at a coffee shop and watched as seven people in a row ordered something without looking up from their phone.

On balance — and notice please that I am saying on balance — Twitter and smart phones are negatives for society. Yes, they provide many valuable things and would seem absolutely science-fictional to someone from 1970.

However like Facebook they are a further method of disengagement while appearing to be engaged.

For all of Armstrong’s faults, at least her writing was actual writing and not a 140-character stream of garbled discontinuous bullshit.

The internet as a useful and positive and non-corporate-captured boon for society peaked around 1999-2002.

After that it has become a tool of control and a place for increasingly witless people to spout nonsense and ignore their own lives.