Does Twitter dumb us down or simply reveal our innate dopiness? That’s the question that’s been flittering about my skullcage after reading Gideon Rachman’s column on the popular microblogging service in yesterday’s Financial Times. In reviewing John McCain’s vigorous tweet stream, Rachman observes that “some of the senator’s tweets make him sound like a peasant.” He quotes one: “Meeting with Dr Kissinger – the smartest man in the world.”

I have this picture in my mind of McCain and Kissinger sitting in comfortable armchairs in a well-appointed governmental office, a couple of aides hovering in the corners, and McCain is bent over his iPhone tapping out a tweet, a vague grin spread across his face. Kissinger isn’t smiling.

I don’t know whether Kissinger tweets. But I did discover two fake Henry Kissingers on Twitter: this one and this one. The former is tedious, but the latter’s pretty good: “Just had breakfast with former President Clinton. We both wore the same tie. It was very funny.”

In the wake of the Iranian election, says Rachman, Twitter’s “terseness and immediacy came into its own.” But he suspects that its role as a revolutionary tool is overrated: “The French revolutionaries somehow managed in 1789, without being able to tweet to each other: ‘Big demo planned outside Bastille.’ The Iranians of 2009 look likely to fail, in spite of the invention of Twitter in the intervening 220 years.”

Then again, if Twitter is turning the mighty into peasants, we may not even need revolutions any more. Obama should send Ahmadinejad an iPhone with the Tweetie app preinstalled. “Meeting with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – the smartest man in the world.” No tyrant could survive a tweet like that.

The Big Switch gets a nice recommendation from Newsweek. It’s #4 on the magazine’s list of Fifty Books for Our Times. Here are the top ten:

1. The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope

2. The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright

3. Prisoner of the State, by Zhao Ziyang

4. The Big Switch, by Nicholas Carr

5. The Bear, by William Faulkner

6. Winchell, by Neal Gabler

7. Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

8. Night Draws Near, by Anthony Shadid

9. Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely

10. God: A Biography, by Jack Miles

Michael Chabon, in an elegiac essay in the new edition of the New York Review of Books, rues the loss of the “Wilderness of Childhood” – the unparented, unfenced, only partially mapped territory that was once the scene of youth. It is by now an old theme, but he gives it a vigorous workout:

As the national feeling of guilt over the extermination of the Indians led to the creation of a kind of cult of the Indian, so our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time they have become fetishes, the objects of an unhealthy and diseased fixation. And once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.

Huck Finn, now fully under the thumb of Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas, spends his unscheduled time wandering the fabricated landscapes of World of Warcraft, seeking adventure.

Forget altruism. Misanthropy and egotism are the fuel of online social production. That’s the conclusion suggested by a new study of the character traits of the contributors to Wikipedia. A team of Israeli research psychologists gave personality tests to 69 Wikipedians and 70 non-Wikipedians. They discovered that, as New Scientist puts it, Wikipedians are generally “grumpy,” “disagreeable,” and “closed to new ideas.”

In their report on the results of the study, the scholars paint a picture of Wikipedians as social maladapts who “feel more comfortable expressing themselves on the net than they do off-line” and who score poorly on measures of “agreeableness and openness.” Noting that the findings seem in conflict with public perceptions, the researchers suggest that “the prosocial behavior apparent in Wikipedia is primarily connected to egocentric motives … which are not associated with high levels of agreeableness.”

The researchers also looked at gender differences among Wikipedians. They found that the women who contribute to the online encyclopedia exhibit unusually high levels of introversion. Women in particular, they suggest, “seem to use the Internet as a compensative tool” that allows them to “express themselves” in a way “they find difficult in the offline world.”

The study is consistent with other research into the motivations underlying online social production. Last year, researchers at HP Labs undertook an extensive study of why people upload videos to YouTube. They found that contributors are primarily driven by a craving for attention. If the videos they upload aren’t clicked on, they tend to quickly exit the “community.” YouTubers view their contributions not as pieces of “a digital commons” but as “private goods” that are “paid for by attention.”

Scott Caplan, a communications professor at the University of Delaware, tells New Scientist that studies of social networks generally indicate that “people who prefer online social behaviour tend to have higher levels of social anxiety and lower social skills.”

None of this is particularly surprising. But the findings do lend a darker tint to the rose-colored rhetoric that surrounds online communities. A wag might suggest that “social production” would be more accurately termed “antisocial production.”

Do not ask for whom the Google tolls. It tolls for me.

I woke up this morning to discover that I no longer exist. The entire contents of this blog has been erased from Google’s index. Every post. Every last bon mot. Gone. Without a trace.

Here, by way of illustration, is what you’ll get if you google the word “google” and restrict the search to the roughtype.com domain:

Now I know how Adam and Eve felt after God kicked their sorry asses out of Eden.

I’m on my knees. Please, Google, I beg of you, let me back into the promised land. I swear I’ll never use Bing again.

UPDATE: I’m unbanished. See comments for details.

It’s amazing that, before Google came along, any of us was able to survive beyond childhood. At the company’s Zeitgeist conference in London yesterday, cofounder Larry Page warned that privacy-protecting restrictions on Google’s ability to store personal data were hindering the company from tracking the spread of diseases and hence increasing the risk of mankind’s extinction. The less data Google is allowed to store, said Page, the “more likely we all are to die.” (This is a particularly sensitive issue for Page, as he’s a big backer of the Singularitarians’ attempts to secure human immortality.)

I couldn’t help but be reminded of how, back in 2001, Google saved the life of that fellow who was about to suffer a heart attack. The guy was having chest pains, and he went to the Web to seek medical advice. The first search engine he tried – not Google’s – got bogged down by serving up graphical banner ads. So he switched to Google, which only served text ads, and in a snap discovered he should take aspirin and go to a hospital. “Not only did our search engine save his life,” said Sergey Brin, the other, equally humble cofounder, “but it shows that these decisions – like whether to use text-based or graphical ads – matter.”

In 2005, Google announced that it would begin running graphical ads to increase its revenues. By that time, most people had broadband connections and, for them, loading graphical ads was no longer quite so much of a life-threatening ordeal. And what of the millions of people who continued to rely on pokey dial-up connections? Google ran the numbers, I suppose, and calculated that they were dispensable.