Placing the emphasis on society, I believe, dilutes the great importance of the decisions of the individual. In life you should take responsibility for your own actions first. The question is more "Is twitter a social problem?" or "Is my twitter use a problem?".

>Placing the emphasis on society, I believe, dilutes the great importance of the decisions of the individual. In life you should take responsibility for your own actions first.

I guess that's also a difference between different country's philosophies.

For me, taking "responsibility for your own actions" is a bad advice when there's stuff that needs to change at the societal level. We wouldn't say that about an issue we deem important, like racism.

We understand there that it's not just what some person believes or not, but also certain general norms, distractions, laws etc that effect this, and we strive to change those.

What I say is that technological change should be seen with the same critical eyes, not just as a inevitable constant each one should put up with or shut up, but as in "do we, as a society want to progress in this or that way? What world would we rather live in?".

There's something very Chinese about banning social media with the ostensible goal of encouraging people to focus on their work.

(Also, where do you stop with your "addictive and mind crushing" barrier? Other forums, like HN? Video games? Fiction books? Theatre? "Thought-negating" music?)

I like the "where does it stop" part, but i withhold my upvote because of the chinese reference. Because I feel that's a bit racist (despite the great firewall of china). Besides, don't they have their own Facebook, google equivalents? So i think the idea isn't to stop people from using such services but to stop them from using such AMERICAN services (after the PRISM incident, it looks like they were the smart ones after all)

While I agree that naive technological utopianism is worrisome and we need to be discussing the social/psychological impact of our inventions, I can't say I would draw an equivalence between Twitter and something like cigarettes... if used in moderation, I think services like Twitter can be very useful to some people. We do need to weigh the costs vs. the benefits, but just as blind acceptance is bad, so is blind rejection... having this discussion is a good start though.