So apparently, the city of New York feels that you can be thrown in jail for refusing to Tweet:

Police in Long Island, New York, have arrested a man for not using Twitter.

Someone named Justin Bieber, who apparently is a teenage singer, was supposed to appear at the Roosevelt Field mall on Friday, but stayed away because the crowd had become too unruly. Police asked a record label executive to help disperse the horde using the messaging service, and claim he didn’t cooperate.

Okay… first off, has anyone in this crowd of raving lunatics listened to Justin Bieber’s music?  Thanks to the advent of iTunes web previews, you can get just enough of a sample to realize that “his” music is utter crap.  And I say “his” because there is so much Auto-tune and post-processing going on that what one is hearing is just not a human voice.  So, we all know what this is about: a fresh-faced looking kid being served up to a bunch of fanatical screaming fangirls who care not that the poor kid can’t actually sing.

Sorry kid.  But being audio-processed to death just ain’t singin’.

Anyway, back to my point… the bottom line is this: anyone who was a part of this stupid crowd pretty much deserved to be Darwin’d.

Second, apparently there were in fact tweets telling people to go home.  The crowd ignored them.  Gee, what a surprise!

So, what is the NYPD on about here?  Twitter is an interesting tool, but not a magic, Simon-Says, crowd-dispersing device.  And besides, keeping quiet was probably the best thing the record exec could’ve done, rather than sending out more tweets that would at best be ignored, and at worst caused a more inflammatory response.  What minor was endangered here?  What criminal nuisance did the arrestee cause?

Teenybopperism aside, this case could have chilling effects for speech (or, lack thereof).  So now you can get arrested if The State directs you to say something via your (or the person you represent’s) Twitter account?  Uhh, not exactly the road we should be going down.

That’s right, Twitter went down today due to DDoS attacks. Old news. I’m writing, however, about how people responded to this bit of fail.

A few hours of Twitter outage, and apparently, people had stompy fits, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the last blackberry outage. See, there were rumors out there, that there existed these hives of Starbucks-dwelling hermits who spent all of their time huddled around laptops and netbooks or incessantly fondling the touchscreens of their cell phones, and their only interaction with the outside world happens to be Twitter. And if ever it were to go down… OH NO! they just wouldn’t survive the day and would be incapable of coping with the real world again.

Just rumors, I thought. Total exaggeration. No one would be that stupid, that facetious, that fad-obsessed, that an actual social life would be nonexistent in the face of the almighty Twitter.

Apparently, and as a testament to the truly sad state this humanity has degenerated to, I was so wrong:

For Twitter users, the outage meant no tweeting about lunch plans, the weather or the fact that Twitter is down.

“I had to Google search Twitter to find out what was going on, when normally my Twitter feed gives me all the breaking news I need,” said Alison Koski, a New York public-relations manager. She added she felt “completely lost” without Twitter.

Oh heavens, she had to actually Google something to find out about something? The utter indignity! How did she survive such a harrowing ordeal! I mean to think for a few hours, she had to look away from her cell phone to find out what’s going on in the world! WHAT HORROR!