TORONTO — Never mind the OMGs and LOLs -- literary giant Margaret Atwood thinks the Internet is making us more literate.

Atwood, 72, is no slouch when it comes to embracing technology, and spoke in defence of Internet culture at Toronto's nextMEDIA conference on Monday.

"Twitter is like a lot of other short forms that preceded it. It's like the telegraph, like smoke signals, like writing your name on a washroom wall," she said.

"I would say that reading and writing skills have increased because what all this texting and so-forth replaced was the telephone conversation."

Atwood added that the Internet is "a great literacy driver."

In fine form in front of a crowd of about 200 media executives, Atwood used her playfully dry humour to describe her ascent from traditional writer to Twitter-friend to 280,000 "T-pals."

Her panel was moderated by ZoomerMedia's McLean Greaves, who first taught Atwood the tricks of the Twitter trade when she joined the site in 2009.

"Being the guy who introduced Margaret Atwood to Twitter is like being the guy who sold golf clubs to Tiger Woods," he joked.

A multi-faceted idea-generator, Atwood has helped invent a pen that does book-signings remotely and face-to-face interaction software so fans can meet celebrities from a distance. Not only does it help authors who would be otherwise unable to travel to their readers, it has the potential to help kids' writers stay healthy -- Atwood said wryly: "Children's authors don't actually like to go into schools because it's a germ factory."

Often chuckling at her own jokes, Atwood began the panel with a comedic presentation on the types of questions she finds herself asking, compared with those that came up years ago.

"Questions you asked when you were 18... How will I eat?" read one of her slides.

"Huffington Post bloggers have some other answer to that," she quipped, a jab at the site's reputation in what it pays its writers.

Atwood, who has published several books of speculative fiction, seemed keenly interested in the future of media, sharing brighter predictions than those who warn we're moving away from net neutrality and risk a two-tiered Internet.

"Web 2.0 demanded that you act like it," she said, part of an often-times morbid PowerPoint of home-made comic-strips. "Web 3.0 will allow you to act like you."

But beyond that, "Web 10.0 is going to look a lot like Web 3.5. There's only so far you can go. Every technology we make is an extension of human capabilities, desires and fears, and that smorgasbord is limited.

"There is a Japanese contest for making a piece of technology... that is judged on its uselessness, but that is a niche concept."

When it comes to books, Atwood thinks paper and ink will always have a place in our society -- especially if the post-apocalyptic world she's created in her books comes to fruition, but also in other, more immediate circumstances: "solar flares, Internet overload and electrical brownouts."

She's also rooting for bookstores, which seem a dying breed in the days of ordering online from home.

"Will we be sorry if bookstores vanish? We should be, because they enable serendipity," she said. "Online is terrific if you know what you want...

"It's a lot like the Japanese tour groups that go to galleries. They go directly to the three pictures in the museum they want to see, they look at those pictures, and then they leave."

And what of last summer's foofaraw with Coun. Doug Ford, who claimed he wouldn't know the author if he saw her, while she pushed him and his council to avoid library cuts? Atwood she says she's stopped more on the street now than she ever was.

"I can't go down the street in Toronto without people yelling ‘Margaret, we recognize you!'" she said. "(The campaign for Toronto libraries) has deeply enriched my life."