Baroness Complete Twitter

I have just read the following piece in the Observer:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/01/twitter-facebook-social-network-regulation

The piece was about this weeks announcement by leading neuroscientist and "people's peer" Baroness Susan Greenfield. Baroness Greenfield has declared that social networking websites are bad for your health. More on The Baroness can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Greenfield

What a joke! When I first saw the comments this week, my first reaction was to laugh that anyone could take this seriously. The Baroness is the kind of Luddite that would in the 1800s have complained that libraries were dangerous because they contained too much information in one place. The sad and worrying thing is that as a top scientist and 'peoples peer' she is a spokesperson for British Science.

Another news piece that I saw this week was on CBS News from the US showing members of the Republican party furiously using Twitter on their Blackberries trying to reconnect with the American people. If there is anything that could destroy the cool-factor of Twitter faster than getting a tweet from John McCain I would like to know what it is. However it does seem that the GOP have realised too late that the public now see through the rubbish that comes out on Fox News 24/7 and they want to connect directly with political leaders in a way that they have never been able to before. People are just not interested in stage-managed, heavily spun news show who are speaking for a particular political agenda. There is a whole new generation that can use the Internet to find the truth behind any story or at least to get a much larger consensus of opinion on something within seconds. Barack Obama won the election by connecting in a more personal and less corporate way

The good Baroness Greenfield should realise that there is no way back from where we are. We are not going to go back in time, destroy all modern technologies and inventions and go back to cave-dwelling. Surly there must be tremendous benefits in educational terms in the amount of reading and writing that younger people do on mediums like Twitter. They would gain more Languages and exposure to different cultures, opinions and evolve in a way that would just not have been possible in the past without racking up 10000s of airmiles. Why would we want to go back in time to where younger people spent hours in front of TV screens showing broadcasts from their local station, with no interaction, wide-ranging debate, conversation or community? Is this what the Baroness Advocates? If this were the case and Britain was to put some kind of block on these activities I am sure we would simply become less technology savvy, less creative and less educated people. Technologies like Twitter are here to stay much like the Cell Phone or email it is a communications tool that people find convenient and helps them to communicate with people globally and instantly. There is nothing inherently wrong in it. It is just like writing lots of short letters to people you know and don't know without buying stamps. Its great! If the Baroness thinks that her comments will have any weight in reducing the time people spend using tools such as Twitter she should also think again. I am sure that a vast amount of people had not even heard of Twitter before this week. Also preaching to 'young people' from an Ivory Tower in Westminster about what they shouldn’t be doing is not going to stop this group, it will encourage them.

If you don’t know how Twitter works, here is one from some kid in Chicago, who does Twitter a bit: http://twitter.com/BarackObama