{"id":4921,"date":"2011-10-19T22:54:24","date_gmt":"2011-10-20T02:54:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=4921"},"modified":"2011-10-31T15:47:57","modified_gmt":"2011-10-31T19:47:57","slug":"followup-chomsky-on-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2011\/10\/19\/followup-chomsky-on-social-media\/","title":{"rendered":"Followup: Chomsky on Social Media"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Last week, Nathan Jurgenson<\/a> linked to an interview with Noam Chomsky<\/a>, where Chomsky argued that social media is superficial:<\/p>\n

Jeff Jetton:<\/strong> Do you think people are becoming more comfortable communicating through a device rather than face to face or verbally?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Noam Chomsky:<\/strong> My grandchildren, that\u2019s all they do. I mean, of course they talk to people, but an awful lot of their communication is extremely rapid, very shallow communication. Text messaging, Twitter, that sort of thing.<\/p>\n

Jeff Jetton:<\/strong> What do you think are the implication for human behavior?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Noam Chomsky:<\/strong> It think it erodes normal human relations. It makes them more superficial, shallow, evanescent. One other effect is there\u2019s much less reading. I can see it even with my students, but also with my children and grandchildren, they just don\u2019t read much.<\/p>\n

Jeff Jetton:<\/strong> Because there\u2019re so many distractions, or\u2026?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Noam Chomsky:<\/strong> Well you know it\u2019s tempting\u2026there\u2019s a kind of stimulus hunger that\u2019s cultivated by the rapidity and the graphic character and, for the boys at least, the violence, of this imaginary universe they\u2019re involved in. Video games for example. I have a daughter who lives near here. She comes over Sunday evening often for dinner. She brings her son, a high school student. And of course he hasn\u2019t done any homework all weekend, naturally, so he has to do all his homework Sunday night. What he calls doing homework is going into the living room while we\u2019re eating, sitting with his computer and with his headphones blaring something, talking to about ten friends on whatever you do it on on your computer, and occasionally doing some homework.<\/p>\n

Jeff Jetton:<\/strong> How do you know what he\u2019s doing?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Noam Chomsky:<\/strong> I watch him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jurgenson offered an epistemological critique<\/a> of Chomsky, arguing that Chomsky’s dismissal of social media as superficial fits a long-standing pattern of affluent white academics maintaining their privileged position in society by rejecting media that is accessible to non-experts.\u00a0 Jurgenson pointedly asks “who benefits when what you call \u201cnormal\u201d human relationships get to be considered more \u201cdeep\u201d and meaningful?”\u00a0 Chomsky is seemingly ignorant to the use of Twitter and other networks in shaping the Arab Spring and the #Occupy movement; or the fact that young people are voraciously sharing and consuming important news stories through these same networks; or that Blacks and Hispanics were early adopters of smartphones; or that gay men have been pioneers in geo-locative communication. In many cases, historically-disadvantaged groups have used social media technology to find opportunities previously foreclosed to them.\u00a0 For these folks, social media is hardly trivial.<\/p>\n

\"Noam<\/a><\/p>\n

Jurgenson’s post generated much discussion, perhaps due to Chomsky’s iconic status amongst America’s left-wing.\u00a0 And, while I, too, must profess a personal indebtedness to Chomsky for serving, in my youth, as an introduction to cogent political thinking outside of the mainstream, my admiration for the man in no way diminishes the fact that his framing of this issue is woefully out-of-date.\u00a0 Interestingly, most negative reactions to Jurgenson’s post argue that Jurgenson’s critique was a cheap shot, attacking an off-the-cuff remark that was never meant for rigorous debate.\u00a0 It is this claim that I wish to dispel.\u00a0 Chomsky’s comment is, in fact, a logical extension of\u00a0 his well-known and long-defended perspective on media consumption\u2014developed, most notably, in Manufacturing Consent<\/a> (the book co-authored by Edward S. Herman that also inspired a documentary of the same name<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Chomsky\u2014in his politics as in his linguistics\u2014is a rigid structural determinist.\u00a0 This means that he tends to give priority to the forces of order, structure, and control.\u00a0 Ironically, for such a well-regarded social activist, this leaves very little room for people to engage in resistance or to appropriate the means of communication (at least without wholesale revolutionary change). Chomsky’s grim view of broadcast media is, arguably, a simplification of Adorno and Horkheimer’s gravely pessimistic treatise on the culture industry\u2014still read by most undergraduate social science majors.\u00a0 Chomsky makes what is, basically, an epistemological claim: those in the ownership class will inevitably use the means of communication at their disposal to produce an ideology that reinforces their own privileged position in the world.\u00a0 The financial\/political elite are best able to pursuit their own interests when the masses are distracted and passified.<\/p>\n

Unlike many commentators, Chomsky does not view communication technologies as politically neutral.\u00a0 Rather, Chomsky argues that certain characteristics of various media either promote or inhibit critical discussion.\u00a0 For example, Chomsky attacks concision <\/em>in television and radio interviews as a structural constraint that prevents discourse from veering off of well-established scripts.\u00a0 You can get a good taste of his position in a clip from the documentary starting at 1:30 here<\/a>:<\/p>\n