In an interview uploaded to YouTube, Noam Chomsky answers the question “[d]oes the generative potential of the internet help to form new kinds of social or cultural associations” by saying that he knows of “actual cases” of “adolescents who think they have 500 friends, because they have 500 friends on Facebook, but these are the kinds of friends who, if you say, ‘I had a sandwich,’ they ask ‘Did it taste good?’”
Chomsky’s disdain for social media originates in its encouragement of “interactions” that are “different from having a real friend, someone you can talk to.”
Although he claims such relationships are “not all bad,” he then says that “although I don’t use the social media, I can see the effects in my own correspondence.”
“I get a ton of correspondence,” he says, “used to be hard copy, letters people actually write, but now it’s mostly email. Recently, I didn’t notice it, but [his secretary] pointed out that … a lot of the letters that come in, they aren’t comments or queries, they’re one sentence long.”
“If you look at the nature of those one sentence letters,” he says, “you can see that most of the time it’s something that came to somebody’s mind, you know, they’re walking down the street, they had a thought and sent it out. But if they thought about it for two minutes, they wouldn’t have sent it.”
“Oftentimes I get a query from someone who saw something I said on YouTube,” he continues. “And they ask me ‘Why’d you say this?’ But of course, if a talk’s on YouTube, there aren’t any footnotes. But if they bothered to look up something in print, they would’ve seen why I said that.”
Chomsky then went on to denigrate those whose primary sources of knowledge are online, saying that when he tells these people they should “take a look at something they can look up and read, that usually ends the conversation.”
“The idea that you might want to read something is too much, can’t do that.”
This is all about access. All those people sending him one-sentence emails aren't people who would've sent letters prior to the Internet age. But now that everyone has an email address or is on Facebook and Twitter, the unwashed masses have easy access to spew and it's unsettling to the likes of Chomsky. I think what we're seeing is much more related to an increase in access than a dumbing down. The worsening signal-to-noise ratio just makes it look like it's a dumbing down.
Great point, but I have to wonder if there is a slight dumbing down as well. I do a ton of reading, but as a child it was almost exclusively long form. The technology I use most often has helped change that, and I read probably just as much or more, but shorter articles and fewer books. I hate to admit it, but I know the content is not as good, but the format has become habitual. While this is my experience with my consumption, I sometimes wonder what that means for people growing up in today's world who consume, for a baseline, shorter and lower quality content. What effect does that have on their output? At any rate, I think it would be negligible compared to the factor you cited, -access.
I totally agree. I've also noticed a drastic shift with the content I consume moving from mainly long form and short. I've actually started to try to move that back a bit. But one thing I've noticed is that long form has suffered as well and seems to be a little cheaper and poorer quality (on the whole) than I remembered. I wonder if authors feel pressure to compete with bloggers and this plays out to some extent in the quality of their work.
Hmm. Regarding long form, there has always been so many bad bad bad terrible books out there, and more every day. For me it's always been about selecting the great reads that are out there. There will always be dissertations launching books, and niche experts and popularizers putting the time in. But I just think that short form lends itself to dumbing down in many of the ways it is packaged for us. It is packaged to live alongside advertisements and mingles with that. Then there is the internet that coined the term link-bait. At least I'm not the only one :) I've made an effort to read more, longer works over the past couple years as well.
The problem Chomsky makes here is that he is opining about something about which he admittedly has limited knowledge. People always have had engaged in meaningless banter. Some networks enable people to do with with less restrictions of time and distance. Of course this type of interaction outweighs intellectual engagement. It always has, and probably always will. The internet isn't one place.
He was doing really well and then-- “The idea that you might want to read something is too much, can’t do that.” He should know better than to say something so one-dimensional, because it lumps his good points in with the "another old guy who doesn't use the internet fully" point.Chomsky then went on to denigrate those whose primary sources of knowledge are online, saying that when he tells these people they should “take a look at something they can look up and read, that usually ends the conversation.”
That's a great critique. To be sure, the dude probably isn't using the internet to its fullest current potential. It would be interesting to see a list of his bookmarked pages; or what, if any, web service he pays for. There's an idea for a blog right? Chomsky's last 24 hour page visit history. :) Ultimately though - He is correct, because for the majority of students at uni their best resource is still the library.
The evidence is mounting that the brightest, most productive people stay off the web. It's just not worth their time, plus it doesn't develop good habits of mind. It's amazing that a staple of the advice I see in self-help books nowadays is "read books." Really? People need to be told this? Then again, I don't really read books that much. I try to, and I do it all the time for school, but it's not the default use of my free time. Brb, quitting the internet.
I don't think this is implying to flat out "stay off the web." I gathered "stay off of social media, and otherwise (non-intelligent) mediums," which is something I can get behind. Hubski seems to have some relatively intelligent banter on here in my brief experience on the site.
I see the "stay off social media" advice a lot. I have to wonder if the people who say that are using social media the same way as I am, and still want to get off it. I think an interesting hubski though experiment would be everyone taking an objective look at their facebook feeds to see exactly how high or low quality the content actually is, and what this says about the site they presumably spend so much time on. I suspect the answer would be that for a lot of us, nearly everything on our facebook feed is meaningful or interesting to see. The damn thing has personalization as a feature, after all. So I've never understood that paradigm.
meh... I found everything on facebook incredibly mundane and repetitive, and so I got rid of it a few years ago (some time around late 2009 or early 2010). I also was starting to have some privacy concerns, and I think I was pretty far ahead of the curve on that. My facebook experience prior to shutting it off though was similar to: Oh, you had a baby, here's a picture of the kid, now the kid has cake on his face... Oh this other person had a baby, here's a picture of that kid... she has cake on her face too... Oh, you want to tell me how I should vote... thanks, I sincerely appreciate your insight! :/ Oh, you're eating a sandwich, cool... It's Saturday... Go Gators, UCF, Miami, USF, and FSU... bleh I enjoy talking with people on hubski / reddit significantly more; although reddit has been declining for a while now too... which prompted me to find Hubski :D
Well there's a ... block function ... I don't understand the huge class of people who use facebook regularly, complain about it even more regularly, and don't do anything to customize it. Sure, deleting it is one route, and that's fine, although if I deleted my facebook I think I'd probably lose my job (or at least have to expend tons of effort to keep it). However, what I found was that if you block the people who post the sandwiches, facebook becomes possibly the product it was supposed to be.
Yep, that's all I use facebook for now days. If I have a quick message that I want to send to a friend that is easier to send on facebook than through text then I will do it that way. Other than this specific context though, I don't use facebook at all.
what about parties? do you use facebook invite?
While I sympathize with Chomsky, the reality is that people don't always want to read high intellectual things. The reason for this, to me at least, is that many do not see an immediate gain by reading a book about the Spanish Civil War. They do see an immediate validation of some sort in facebook likes, or karma on reddit, or personal contact from celebrity via tweeting. However, I would like to hear Chomsky's thoughts on educational endeavors such as edX, coursea, or Khan Academy. Whose primary focus seems to be to bring undergraduate education to the masses. Autodidacts seem to flock to these services, and at this time they seem to be relatively successful insomuch that they are educating, and not simply generating a loop of content that is created simply as a way to gain likes or karma. On a personal note, I am guilty of doing the very thing that Chomsky points out here. I have asked myself a question but not done the research. It saddens me but there is such a threshold for learning for some questions that it can be just frustrating to even care to get to the answer. This year I read 3 (count them t-h-r-e-e) books about the expanded Star Trek universe. But I still have Georg Joos "Theoretical Physics" sitting here in front of me on the coffee table, that I muddle through every once in a while.
Someone on Hubski (I thought it was you?) mentioned A Short History of Nearly Everything and I remembered that I always meant to read it again. It's fantastic. It's like school but fun. And I forgot enough of it that it's like reading a book for the first time.I read 3 (count them t-h-r-e-e) books about the expanded Star Trek universe. But I still have Georg Joos "Theoretical Physics" sitting here in front of me on the coffee table
Look for the middle ground. After I finished SuperFreakonomics (entertaining, accessible, but not very serious) I picked up something by Kierkegaard and read it on the subway for two days, then carried it a few more days before giving up. I liked the writing, but it wasn't the right ratio of effort and reward for my occasional opportunities to read.
Thanks for the positive re-enforcement! You're right I haven't taken advantage of the middle path in this regard, so I've decided to just keep going through it as I feel the need to and read whatever else happens to come in my path (currently The Girl Who Played with Fire).