Allow me to correct Descartes: I Facebook therefore I am. I’m quite sure that’s what he meant to say. In these days of Internet excess, if you don’t have a Facebook account, a blog or aren’t tweeting at least a couple times a day, well, you wonder whether you actually exist. That’s what it’s beginning to feel like anyway.

First, a confession — I’m a recovering Facebook- and Twitter-aholic. I haven’t always had such a cozy relationship with technology; I started my career as a newspaper reporter and during that time developed a deep mistrust of technology, especially recalcitrant computers that balked at deadlines. But a funny thing happened the past couple years – I became a new media convert, learning as many software applications as I could and joining about every new social networking service that came along – Twitter, Twhirl, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, MySpace … And with my iPod Touch, I can stay connected from just about anywhere.

I’ve become somewhat of a high tech early adopter. I’m proud to say that I now have more than 250 Facebook friends and judging from the number of pokes and superpokes I’ve received, I’m pretty swell. I Digg every news article that catches my eye. If it’s on The New York Times, I send it out to my network via Times People, the latest in social networking sites exclusively for Times readers.

Most recently, I’ve adopted Twitter, a micro-blogging service that allows users to post (via PC, PDA or cell) 140-character updates, known as tweets, to their account in response to the question, “What are you doing?”

Some people answer the question literally:

In doctors office looking at a poster for Travellers Diarrhea [sic].

Some muse about random oddities:

Whats with foaming hand soap… are people so retarded they cant adequately distribute liquid soap? [sic]

Others wax philosophical:

Is it wrong that I secretly wish I could text in the tanning bed? Twelve minutes of doing nothing can sometimes be so difficult.

This social networking service has caught on among the tech savvy, growing exponentially over the past year. It’s so popular that an awards program, The Twitties, has emerged to recognize the best Tweets, which is sort of like choosing the best dot in a Monet landscape.

I was initially skeptical of Twitter. It seemed like little more than a forum for chronic monologists. Then a writer friend of mine tipped me off to one of Twitter’s secret uses. You can use it to take notes.

Aha!

Like my friend, I used to be that writer who would carry a notebook with him everywhere. I lived by the words of the late John Gregory Dunne who was known to extol the virtue of note taking and carried a stack of pocket-sized index cards with him everywhere. So fervent was Dunne’s belief in note taking that he admonished his wife, Joan Didion, on those occasions when she forgot her notebook. “[T]he ability to make a note when something came to mind was the difference between being able to write and not being able to write …” Didion, in her book The Year of Magical Thinking, recalls her husband saying.

As a writer, this is the maxim by which I’ve lived. Rare was the day I wasn’t carrying a notebook and pen. The thought of allowing flashes of inspiration to evanesce was too cruel. Whenever inspiration struck I would sit down and feverishly scribble away. Thoughts, ideas, revelations, story buds. Notebooks mounded in the corner of my bedroom filled with observations, ruminations and ideas, at turns raw, thoughtful, humorous and inspired:

A woman gets on the bus this morning. Sits down. Then, spying a baby across the aisle, slides over. She begins an involved conversation with the child going so far as to tell him about the lives of her own children. The woman carries on this conversation with the baby as if he understands. All this and yet she has not even engaged the mother with a simple “hello.” The craziness caused by babies.

The specificity of my friend’s vernacular makes me posit that he was born with a mortarboard on his pate. Need I elucidate further?

When did the PC movement co-opt the class assignments on trains and airlines? No longer is it First Class, it’s Business Class. If you’ve got a first class, then of course you need a second class and we don’t want to imply that any passengers are second-class. I mean that would be like calling it low class, peon class, barely-better-than-dirt class.

M. is an emotional vampire. She sucks all the positivity and emotional verve out of me. When I’m around her I go cold, harden myself. To expose the soft underbelly of my emotions would be dangerous.

When I read through old notebooks, I felt like a collector, a hoarder of ideas. These were the germs of stories. Not only that, they were a catharsis, spilling emotions, feelings and anguish onto the page.

But no more. I’m done recording ideas in analog. Now I Tweet. Bye, bye uncomfortable notebook shoved in my back pocket. Whenever the moment takes me, I just flip open my cell, tap a few keys and viola! Ideas instantly uploaded to the Net, preserved in digital form.

The entries are concise, 140-character clarity.

Writer v writer column 8:38 PM May 27th

Self bk wk 2gethr wo killin 8:46 PM May 27th

Parallel parking for professionals. 1:16 PM Jul 22nd

OK, perhaps it’s not clear to you, but to me these are the glorious seeds of stories, seeds that without Twitter might have been scattered by the capricious currents of my mind. In addition to story ideas, I often use it to remind myself about things I’ve heard on the radio or during conversation. And the handiness of Twitter is remarkable: I always have my cell phone with me, I never have to worry about a pen running dry, never have to search for or through a notebook, and, with a single hand, can quickly key in a note (just the other week I was cruising the interstate taking notes at 65 mph).

One of the other benefits of Twitter is brevity. The 140-character limit forces me to write concisely. I cut to the core quickly. No rambling, circuitous passages. Like sound bytes for the printed page. 

Quick. Convenient. Concise. Clutter-free.

I’m a convert. Twitter, I luv u.

Instead of notebooks, I now collect Tweets.

I feel Net savvy.

On the cutting edge.

I feel cool.

After several weeks of smug self-satisfaction, hungry for inspiration, I took a moment to look back on past Tweets:

KT had a little lamb, er, goat. 5:58 PM Aug 31st

Now boarding for Eugene. 10:19 AM Sept 10th

At the symphony. 10:31 PM Sept 12th

He-man himself 7:24 PM Sept 14th

Nothing but mental bric-a-brac, small, trivial and inconsequential tid-bits. Once expansive thoughts are now circumscribed by this 140-character pool. Thinking remains shallow. There’s no more room for deep thinking in the Twitter universe. My ideas are truncated, one-sentence servings. I don’t feel the NEED to write more than that.

I realize it’s been a long time since I felt that charge of inspiration that comes from scribbling down thoughts and letting them blossom on the page. That scribbling gave me genuine satisfaction, not the pseudo satisfaction that accompanies so many of these social networking tools that make you feel as though you’re doing something worthwhile when you’re really not doing anything but wasting time. But more than that, it allowed me to work through my thoughts, come to realizations and was the spark for so many new ideas. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, I wrote myself into a place of knowing. Could that magic happen in 140 characters?

Then an idea strikes. The first genuine idea in weeks. I reach not for my cell phone but for my reliable old moleskine journal (the kind Ernest Hemingway reportedly favored). The slim black notebook fits my palm so nicely. I turn to a blank page and begin to write: Is Twitter killing my creativity?

I'm sorry, Dear Twitter, but we are not destined to be BFFs.

MICHAEL WERNER, associate editor of Etude, wrote this column with pen and paper.