Captain Picard: Resistance to Twitter isn’t futile

Starfleet Captain Jean-Luc Picard has officially informed the Federation that he will not engage in senseless Twittering. 

“I don’t Tweet. I’ve never Twittered. And it’s not that I am resisting it, I see no reason to have it in my life,” Patrick Stewart explained during an interview with PBS Digital Nation.

“To reduce life to 140 characters, just seems to me to be a little bit simplistic. Maybe I like complexity and abstraction too much.”

Nevertheless, Stewart readily admitted that the iPhone has become a virtual extension of himself.

“I never have [the iPhone] out of my hand. I do everything with it. And [I find that] e-mail is absolutely essential, the form of e-mail is great. And I love the Internet.”

“[For example], I can pull up the complete works of Shakespeare if I can’t remember a line. It is sensational!”

Meanwhile, the Canadian Press reports that social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter “are being blamed” for an increasing number of post-secondary students who “can’t seem” to write properly.

“There has been this general sense in the last two or three years that we are finding more students are struggling in terms of language proficiency,” explained Rummana Khan Hemani, a director at at Simon Fraser University.

“Little happy faces…or a sad face…little abbreviations show up even in letters of academic appeal. Instead of ‘because’, it’s ‘cuz’. That’s one I see fairly frequently.”