Noam Chomsky: My grandchildren, that's 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.
Jeff Jetton: What do you think are the implication for human behavior?
Noam Chomsky: It think it erodes normal human relations. It makes them more superficial, shallow, evanescent. One other effect is there's much less reading. I can see it even with my students, but also with my children and grandchildren, they just don't read much.
Jeff Jetton: Because there're so many distractions, or...?
Noam Chomsky: Well you know it's tempting... there's a kind of stimulus hunger that's cultivated by the rapidity and the graphic character and, for the boys at least, the violence, of this imaginary universe they're 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't 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're 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.
Jeff Jetton: How do you know what he's doing?
Noam Chomsky: I watch him.
This week this interview with Noam Chomsky has been picked up in a bowdelrised form by everyone from The New York Times to Salon.
'Crazy old anarchist guy hates Twitter!'
So I thought it would be interesting to show what Uncle Noam actually said - six months ago.
As opposed to just regurgitating crap out of context and that.
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