Nicki Laycoax’s job is driving her to distraction.

A Web 3.0 specialist for Squish, a local Web design and development company, Laycoax handles the social media efforts of her company and its clients. Among her duties is Tweeting — a lot.

She manages the Twitter accounts of several Squish clients, and also Tweets as a Squish executive. With more than 1,500 followers, Laycoax is one of Indianapolis’ top 20 Twitter users according to Twitter.grader.com.

If you don’t have a Twitter account yet, it’s probably a matter of personal principle. The popular microblogging service (it lets people send and receive 140-character updates called “Tweets”) was launched in early 2006, and has gone mainstream over the past year. Last month, its popularity was manifested in a Twestival — a global “Tweet-up” that spanned 170 cities.

It seems Twitter is here for good. But is that a good thing? Laycoax admits to asking the question from time to time. “There are times when I will think to myself, ‘What is the purpose of this? What’s the point?’.”

Nicholas Carr, a Harvard-educated journalist and author, wrote a cover story for The Atlantic last summer asking the question, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” “Over the past few years,” he wrote, “I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.”

I asked Carr if he thought Twitter, like Google, was “remapping the neural circuitry” of its users.

“Twitter, like text messaging, is antithetical not just to deep concentration, but to any kind of concentration,” he answered. “It is, by design, a distraction technology.”

Carr doesn’t think that necessarily means Twitter will distract people from getting work done.

“Many jobs today involve the rapid processing of diverse bits of information,” he said. “Twitter may well make some workers more productive.” But that productivity comes with a price.

“The cost is shallowness of thought,” Carr said. “It’s impossible to think deeply if you’re constantly processing 140-character messages.”

So what if Twitter is turning its users into an army of “Twits” incapable of sustained, deep thought?

“That may not matter if you’re rewarded more for rapid thought than deep thought, as many of us are today,” Carr said. “I think people adapt fairly readily to new media, and I suppose that’s the case with Twitter. If the pressure becomes bothersome, there are probably pharmaceuticals available to temper the effects.”