Yesterday, Twitter released a statistic that made my head hurt. Apparently, the site now boasts 50 million tweets per day. That’s 600 tweets per second. In the question of quantity or quality, quantity has delivered a resounding blow.

The March 2010 issue of Entrepreneur magazine includes an article called, bluntly, “E-mail is Making You Stupid.”  In the piece, Joe Robinson explores the dangers—to productivity, attention spans, ability to focus and quality of work—of constant interruptions in the form of e-mails, IMs, texts, tweets and facebook messages. (He calls them the “workday cacophony of rings, pings and buzzes that are turning jobs into an electronic game of Whac-a-Mole.”) Highlighting a Microsoft study that claims that it takes 15 minutes for someone to refocus after being interrupted, he notes that the average worker loses 2.1 hours of productivity each day. Whenever I peek at someone’s Twitter feed and see the time stamps—10:15 am, 11:02 am, 11:29 am, 11:53 am, 2:15 pm, 2:17 pm, 2:23 pm, 2:31 pm, 2:46 pm—I can’t help but wonder if that person gets anything done (and if their boss can see their tweets). 

It's not a new complaint that Twitter, blogs, reality shows and memoirs encourage narcissistic behavior. A few weeks ago, The New Yorker published a piece by Daniel Mendelsohn called “But Enough About Me,” about the history and popularity of memoirs. He writes,

“Like a drunken guest at a wedding, [memoir] is constantly mortifying its soberer relatives (philosophy, history, literary fiction)—spilling family secrets, embarrassing old friends—motivated, it would seem, by an overpowering need to be the center of attention.”

And, though social media works by creating a network, with information running in multiple directions, I find myself bothered by the narcissism of the whole enterprise. Even Twitter's phrasing—you build up “followers”—lets each user be the king or queen of his or her own social media empire, and all of one's followers are apparently interested in the minute-by-minute happenings of someone else's life.

Me me me. Tweet tweet.

Now, here’s where I say that clearly I’m not on Twitter, and here’s where people tell me that I’m harshly judging the site and the people who use it--that really, it only takes 15 minutes a day, and it’s an essential part of a social media marketing plan and "branding" yourself, and it’s fun, and tweeting celebrities can be hilarious.

And I'll admit, there are some uses of Twitter to which I react with less hostility. Even though Rick Moody’s tweeting of a short story for the journal Electric Literature didn’t quite work out, I can appreciate the exercise as digital haiku.

So tell me: what other uses of Twitter make it worth your time? My example: A friend saw on the author Jonathan Ames's Twitter that he was doing a reading in San Francisco, and Ames’ girlfriend happens to be Fiona Apple, so we went and I got to meet my favorite musician who, despite having the air of a wounded animal, seemed lovely. Can you convince me that if I joined Twitter, I could meet Gwen Stefani, too?

Even without Twitter, I often find myself exhausted by the end of the day from keeping up with blogs, gchat conversations, e-mails, etc. My favorite piece of advice from the Entrepreneur article was to implement “Quiet Time,” a few hours in which electronic communication is prohibited. A few companies, such as Intel, are experimenting with this technique, and finding that workers save time and—gasp!—talk to each other face-to-face.

Will I use Quiet Time? I’ll think about it, after I check my e-mail.