Anya Weber lives in Boston. She is @anyaweber on Twitter.

From the Edgar Allan Poe exhibit at the Boston Public Library, it's clear that Poe was a real drama queen. (He probably got this from his parents, who were both actors.) He was also a merciless critic, and an avid commenter on both the established and the up-and-coming writers of his day.

This quote from a letter Poe wrote to an aspiring younger writer in 1843 got me wondering what Edgar Allan would think of us new-media types:

Be bold - read much - write much - publish little - keep aloof from the little wits, and fear nothing.

How are we to apply this advice to our Web 3.0 existence, to the chattering digital ocean in which all writers today must sink or swim? “Publish little” is advice that will lower your Google page rank, that will weaken your website’s manly efforts at building SEO muscle. Those who “publish little” disappear. They are passed over, ignored. They become invisible.

Or maybe their words, being fewer, stand out more. The growing "slow-word movement" emphasizes quality over quantity. Trevor Butterworth has an elegant article in Forbes where he emphasizes the dangers of our “relentless, endless free diet of fast media.” But what exactly is the verbal equivalent of slow food? How can someone be reflective, or even think before speaking, in a communication environment that was referred to as “warp-speed” a decade ago, before it really got moving?

Early Native Americans were stunned at the amount of chatter they heard from the first European colonists. In many native North American communities, the only people who talked frequently were children, and it was because they hadn’t yet acquired self-control. Is our digital-verbal immersion infantilizing us?

Social media is a new and flexible connective tissue. But we’re still learning how to flex these muscles. Maybe our current babble mode doesn’t portend society’s downfall. Maybe it’s a sign of our cultural toddler-hood. But what digital adulthood will look like is anyone’s guess.

Poe’s stories, 150 years after he wrote them, are alive, defiant, ornery, and as visceral as an ice cube down your back. Can we say the same for our own stories? What about our tweets?

I don’t really care whether the people I follow on Twitter tweet many times a day or twice a year. What matters to me is whether they have something real to say. I’ve unsubscribed from several e-newsletters lately, because their authors have already harvested their useful ideas. They are now strip-mining their brains in order to keep up with their weekly or biweekly publishing schedule.

You have to write a lot, to be a good writer. You also have to throw most of it away, unseen by any eyes but yours. This is the compost out of which real writing grows. But what happens when we throw this compost at the wall on a daily basis, and expect it to flower?

I encourage the mediabistro community to ask ourselves: Can I write more, and publish less, in a way that will make what I do publish more meaningful? Marketers and businesspeople, is there a way to publish more selectively and receive a higher return on your investment?

If you find an answer, drop me a line. For my money, it’s one of the big questions of our digital-toddler age.