By Audra Schroeder on October 24, 2013 Email
Noam Chomsky, noted linguist and activist, took time out recently to eloquently explain how the Internet is making us stupider.
He’s the star of a short clip called “Noam Chomsky on Sandwiches and Twitter,” uploaded yesterday to YouTube channel the Chomsky Videos. The question he was asked: Does the generative potential of the Internet help to form new kinds of social or cultural associations? He says he doesn’t actually use social media, but that he can “see the effects” in his correspondence with people on YouTube and Twitter.
A lot of the emails he receives are one sentence long, he adds, and usually from Twitter:
“If you look at the nature of those one-sentence letters, you can see that most of the time it’s something that came to somebody’s mind, walking down the street, and they sent it out. If they’d thought about it for two minutes, they wouldn’t have sent it.”
Categories: Americas, United States