I got too worked up by the kerfuffle between The New Yorker’s George Packer and The New York Times’ Nick Bilton over Twitter, information overload, and media transformation to limit my thoughts to 140 characters. So I thought I’d try to set them down here.

To recap: A week ago, Packer wrote a blog post fretting about smart phones and Twitter, neither of which he uses because he worries that the flood of information they would unleash on him would be his undoing. He revealed that he habitually turns his retrograde Samsung off on the Accela between DC and New York so that he can read actual books, and called Twitter “crack for media addicts,” a line that has been widely tweeted.

On Wednesday, Bilton responded by extolling Twitter’s many virtues, including its value as an organizing tool in crisis situations and as a customer-service platform for corporations. He went on to tout Twitter’s transformative impact on news, noting that Packer draws his paycheck from the news biz—a rather odd assertion to make, especially from the perspective of this recently unemployed editor, given the dwindling number of paychecks the news biz has to hand out thanks in part to new forms of communication such as Twitter. Bilton also suggested that Packer would have abstained from riding the train when it was new 150 years ago, and in tweeting his post, pronounced Packer’s perspective “intolerant.” Apparently, “the Twitter train has left the station,” to use the title of his post, and you’re on it or off—there’s no in between.

Finally, yesterday, Packer challenged that assertion, declaring that just because he wasn’t a Biltonite didn’t make him a Luddite. I wish he hadn’t done the predictable thing of announcing that he’d ventured onto Twitter for half an hour only to discover that, sure enough, it wasn’t for him. But as someone who remains ambivalent about Twitter, despite—or perhaps because of—the increasing amount of time I spend on it, I have to agree with his larger point. I certainly share his concern about the impact of Twitter and other continuous data streams on serious reading—my own and everyone else’s. So does Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who is nobody’s idea of a Luddite. So should Bilton, who has a book out this spring.

In his initial missive, Packer explained that what really worries him was New York Times media critic David Carr’s January 1 assessment of Twitter: “There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on.” That worries me, too, especially since, given what I do, any time I spend on Twitter could nominally be considered work—not especially productive work, but work nonetheless—and therefore semi-justifiable. Packer went on to say of Twitter, “It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my son go hungry.” Perhaps it was a mistake for Packer to title his post “Stop the World,” but I don’t see how this sentiment can be characterized as intolerance or even Ludditism; it’s an expression of legitimate individual apprehension about managing one’s time in an attention economy, a concern that’s shared by myself and a lot of other people struggling with the question of where best to direct their eyeballs when there’s more to look at each day.

I find lots to like about Twitter, which has largely supplanted Google Reader as my primary source of Internet news. But what if we extend Bilton’s analogy between Twitter and the train, that great disruptive technology of 150 years ago? The locomotive was the symbol of the Industrial Revolution, which by making the world smaller helped lead the way to great advances in communication, health, and prosperity, but also opened the door to more horrible wars, greater global homogeneity, and a rapidly warming planet. Online, it often seems like it’s impossible for anyone to look at anything in shades of gray, but I think that’s how we need to regard innovation, assessing how it might hurt us even as we celebrate how it can help us. You can appreciate the advantages of living in the future even as you wonder if what you’re doing is entirely healthy.