Over at the New Yorker site, staff writer and Interesting Times blogger George Packer trains a skeptical eye on Twitter, BlackBerries, and all their cousins. Somewhere some user of a hand-held communication device must have been killed after stepping out into the street in front of a moving vehicle. Perhaps the driver who ran over him was sending him a text.
Packer's piece has elicited a lot of discussion around the Web. I'm on his side, and there's evidence. More. But the debate is not new. In Walden, for example, which was published in 1854, Thoreau offered the following assessment of the day's technological innovations:
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
He got a lot of things right.
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