From Business Week-Luddites of the World, Relax!

News that Twitter's latest cash infusion values the microblogging site at $1 billion may have confounded twittering's critics, who say nothing worthwhile can be expressed in 140 characters.

To them—and to those who think BlackBerrys enslave us, Facebook supplants real relationships, and texting makes us illiterate—Dennis Baron has this to say: Nonsense. Worries about new ways of communicating, he has found, have existed for millennia. (Socrates objected to writing, in part because this "invention" eliminated the need to exercise the memory.)

Baron, an English and linguistics professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has just published A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution (Oxford University Press). One reason he wrote the book, he says, was to remind today's Luddites of the skepticism that reliably greeted each new communication device in the past.

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