Julie Burchill can’t text. And thinks Twitter is for boring twats.

Yesterday was Ada Lovelace day. Thousands of bloggers celebrated the world’s first lady programmer. Today’s bitter morning after pill is Julie Burchill in the Sun slagging off anyone who pumps driveling status updates on tweetdeck into the unlistening, uncaring ether.

Have you heard of Ada Lovelace? She was Byron’s daughter and worked briefly with Charles Babbage on the Analytical Engine project in the 19th Century. The first Girl Geek. Those personal reflections amongst the bloggerati, twitterati and digerati on how there should be more inspirational heroines are great, and can be seen here on a neat map, too.

There’s no question that men tend to dominate the workforce of the more technical end of the business, as anyone who wandered into an engineering faculty at university can testify. But this speaks to a broader issue with science and education, and a bias that kicks in at secondary and higher education levels. Society too easily parses out the artists from the scientists. Now that being a geek is cool, geek girls are cooler. And geeky girls are getting famous, and it’s a natural step for anyone who ‘networks’ easily to migrate to Twitter where small talk skill (’chatting’) matters.

Peaches Geldof [@peaches_g]  knows that being talked about is what matters to her future lucrative column inches, so she tweets, sometimes incomprehensibly about dashing off to write up some piece for some celeb rag. On the other hand, Julie Burchill proudly proclaims that she has no mobile phone. And that anyone who twitters is a boring twat. There are of course enormous amounts of inane private thoughts and status updates out there, but the old unfollow button applies in twitterville just as it does anywhere else.

Rather like thinking before speaking, I prefer tweets that have been thought about for a second longer before being sent.  But the fact that humankind is so capable of making social signals, and we can speak succinctly to a following of people we know and nosey people we don’t is all rather fascinating, don’t you think? I bet Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace’s dad, would have relished the creative challenge of ditching the iambic pentameter for coaxing out melody, fluency and beauty in 140 characters.

http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/03/24/ada-lovelace-day-celebrating-women-in-tech/

http://community.brandrepublic.com/blogs/quickpeeks/archive/2009/03/24/ada-lovelace-day-celebrating-women-in-technology.aspx