A seemingly ill informed MP

Twittering has to be a symptom of a dysfunctional society. You know the one I’m talking about; when people don’t talk to, care about, help, consider or even interact with each other anymore.

Nadine Dorries's Blog.

Now far be it for me to ever suggest that the MP for Mid Bedfordshire has a habit of believing things that don't stand up to research but this is a doozy. Where as she has a history of professional involvement with abortion, she doesn't seem to have any time working in the field of social networking on her cv. I don't have any expertise in doing scientific research on this kind of subject, but the whole 'facebook causes cancer' fuss caused Ben Goldacre to review what research was out there on internet use and well being and shock horror the picture wasn't all that bad.

To specifics, firstly the quote above, it is a well reported phenomenon that the Twitter community are always willing to help and will do things like passing on questions and crowd sourcing answers, to the point where people are now turning to twitter as the first port of call for information. Secondly (and you'll need to read the original blog post, I'm not quoting it all) the idea that the number of people who turn up to your birthday party is a measure of how well rounded you are and how functional your society is is crazy. Thanks to the social networking there are people that I would to invite to any such celebration but as they thousands of miles away it would be a little pointless. It would be very interesting to find out of the people psycho analysing how many of them were experts in either social networking or Psychoanalysis (note no space).