Browsing the latest Twitter updates today, I came across this article reTweeted by Philosophy Bites: Why Chomsky is Wrong About Twitter, by Nathan Jurgenson. Its catchy subtitle is, "When the linguist claims that social media is "shallow," he isn't very deep or convincing".
First of all, I agree with some of what Jurgenson writes. I do think that Twitter, for example, is a decent medium to express opinions and share information. At least, this is as far as I can tell what he's getting at, since he doesn't really make his pro-side arguments explicit - dealing largely instead with contra-Chomsky et al. And here, the article's "argument" becomes questionable, in regard to the point of not actually criticizing Chomsky but some caricature of Chomsky.
For more context, Jurgenson's article appears to be based on two brief interviews of Chomsky, figureground.ca: Chomsky Interview and brightestyoungthings.com: Chomsky Interview. The second is more candid and loose, so keep that in mind. In those interviews, Chomsky states that Twitter and text-messaging tend towards "shallow communications". Now, keep in mind that Chomsky's comment is to be largely understood in the context of how his grandchildren use those mediums. Here's his full quotes from both articles:
Well, let’s take, say, Twitter. It requires a very brief, concise form of thought and so on that tends toward superficiality and draws people away from real serious communication – which requires knowing the other person, knowing what the other person is thinking about, thinking yourself of what you want to talk about, etc. It is not a medium of a serious interchange. Chomsky, figureground.ca
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. Chomsky, brightestyoungthings.com
From the first quote, it's safe to say that the idea behind it is that serious, sustained, and lengthy discourse is not really possible to do on Twitter or via text-messages. I find that idea almost a truism, and so bland that nothing's really controversial about it. You honestly can't have an in-depth discourse with another person when the discourse is limited to 140 characters. Here, concision largely works against you, unless you tend to think of an "argument" as a three sentence inference: "If A is true, then B is true. A is true; therefore, B is true". QED. Also, notice how he qualifies his comment by adding "tends". That too is important to keep in mind, I think. In the second quote, it's to be understood as I already mentioned it, but it might lend itself to being generalized. However, you have to be careful how widely that generalization is made.
Let's take the second quote and generalize it to mean that most hum-drum everyday text messages and tweets are inconsequential. Glancing at what's trending at Twitter, and I get: #UglyGirlsNotAllowed, #TheresNoWayInHell, THE YEAR OF JONAS BROTHERS, MY FAVORITE KLE, and The Nightmare Before Christmas. I don't see any pressing social issues hash-tagged there, and to find them you have to do your own searching or have to be following certain people or groups. As a general claim, I think this can be supported and fairly defended. Hell, even my own tweets aren't groundbreaking, haha. I readily admit that some of my own tweets are insignificant and uninteresting when considering the "big picture" - the more pressing social issues at hand. Now keep in mind that Chomsky is always interested in those bigger social issues, so things even like sports or entertainment don't even come close to appearing on his radar. And when discussing those social issues, concision doesn't always work with you (despite what naive English majors think, especially when they abuse Blair's "Politics and the English Language"). Often, with concise remarks, they tend to present bland truism which make people nod their heads in agreement: "Gaddafi was a dictator uncongenial to democracy." That remark will go unchallenged, and probably won't even raise any eyebrows. But what if I said: "Twitter isn't a new form of language-production." I'm pretty sure someone would like to know my reasons for saying that. In that case, I'd have to write more than 140 characters to explain myself, and I'd have to use other methods to greatly elaborate my thoughts. To this day, I've never found any serious 28 page essays describing why they hate, say, swirly ice-cream.
Steering back towards Jurgenson's article, he makes the following statements:
Among other things, Chomsky and Co. are making assertions that one way of communicating, thinking and knowing is better than another.
Maybe I should not read too much into these statements, but "off-the-cuff" remarks often reveal much more than we might assume. They illuminate Chomsky’s larger view of media and, most importantly, highlight the larger trend of established first-world intellectuals dismissing digital communications as less deep or worthwhile than the means of communication that they prefer.
[In] the world of Chomsky this important debate [on the pros and cons of social media] is instead undercut by the view that communication on digital media is inherently "shallow."
Digital communications are produced more by some groups than others. Texting, tweeting and the like are not just the domain of wealthy kids and knowledge workers, as some assume. Research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project has demonstrated that nonwhites are much more likely to connect to the Web, communicate and create content on mobile phones than are whites.
When [Chomsky] defends his form of communicating (printed books and periodical essays) with claims that tweeting/texting lacks depth, he is implicitly suggesting that nonwhites and those in the Third World are inherently communicating less deeply than their white and first-world counterparts. He doesn’t seem to know enough about the reality of social media to examine his own assumptions.
Okay, there are a number of issues here, all not exactly the same. To keep things "concise", I won't go into any major details (thus, frustrating anyone who wants reasons). First of all, communicating, thinking, and knowing aren't all the same thing. I can communicate badly, and I can also think of better ways to communicate my ideas. Blogs are better than Twitter, and research papers are better than both. Surely some mediums are better than others, and I can feel confident in using the word better without wrapping it in sneer-quotes. Also, I'm pretty sure my thinking from 8 years ago was worse than my current thinking. Without having access to better ways of thinking, I'd have given up on the intellectual game a long time ago. As for knowing, I now know that I won't really know anything meaningful about, say, NGE if I analyse it purely in terms of Judeo-Christian symbolism. I'm also sure that I know humans better than Nazi death-camp soldiers ever did. So, in a sense, I do know better than others.
From the other quotes, it's reasonably clear that the claim "first-world intellectuals" know, think, and communicate better than "nonwhite" Third World citizens is something Chomsky et al. hold. Or at least, Jurgenson suggests they implicitly hold that idea in their comments or arguments. Nowhere in those interviews does Chomsky say or suggest anything close to this, but Jurgenson goes and attributes this questionable claim to Chomsky. So, when Chomsky was writing in 1971 about the possibly pernicious consequences of behaviorist ideologies, and how could it affect our understanding of freedom and dignity, we should just disregard that article as the musings of a first-world intellectual. Here, I think a lengthy quote is in order:
A century ago, a voice of British liberalism described the "Chinaman" as "an inferior race of malleable orientals." During the same years, anthropology became professionalized as a discipline, "intimately associated with the rise of raciology." Presented with the claims of nineteenth-century racist anthropology, a rational person will ask two sorts of questions: What is the scientific status of the claims? What social or ideological needs do they serve? The questions are logically independent, but the second type of question naturally comes to the fore as scientific pretensions are undermined. The question of the scientific status of nineteenth-century racist anthropology is no longer seriously at issue, and its social function is not difficult to perceive. If the "Chinaman" is malleable by nature, then what objection can there be to controls exercised by a superior race?
Consider now a generalized version of the pseudo-science of the nineteenth century: it is not merely the heathen Chinese who are malleable by nature, but rather all people. Science has revealed that it is an illusion to speak of "freedom" and "dignity." What a person does is fully determined by his genetic endowment and history of "reinforcement." Therefore we should make use of the best behavioral technology to shape and control behavior in the common interest.
Again, we may inquire into the exact meaning and scientific status of the claim, and the social functions it serves. Again, if the scientific status is slight, then it is particularly interesting to consider the climate of opinion within which the claim is taken seriously.
"The Case Against B.F. Skinner" N. Chomsky [notes omitted]
It's all too clear that Chomsky actually agrees with Jurgenson on the issue that an ideology or perspective should not be assumed to be better on one's say so, even when it appears to have some scientific merit. However, it's also clear that Chomsky thinks there are better ways to think, communicate, and know things, as his examples show. It is not Chomsky's assumption that "those in the Third World are inherently communicating less deeply than their white and first-world counterparts." That bad assumption is Jurgenson's, based on Chomsky's brief comments and opinions in the interviews - i.e. they're not really arguments. If anyone wants an actual argument on why blogs, for example, aren't good for serious scholarship, read Brian Leiter's "Why Blogs are Bad for Legal Scholarship". There, you get a thesis, supporting evidence, lengthy and sustained argument, and a conclusion. You know, a well-supported argument - not a comment on one's grandchildren and not a brief truism on everyday texting and Twitter usage. Briefly, Jurgenson attacks a strawman, and not Chomsky. What's the best way to create a strawman? Craft a concise argument, ignore any qualifications made, create issues that aren't the real ones, then attack that version instead.
What's also curious is his referencing Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Patricia Hill Collins. He mentions them in relation to epistemology, the philosophical study of knowledge. By citing them and his use of the word "other" (semioticians' radars will go off when this word is mentioned) it's reasonably clear that Jurgenson thinks that some forms of thinking are marginalized and disregarded. I think that has some truth to it. However, when backing up knowledge claims, I wonder why he doesn't cite, say, modern cognitive psychologists. (Foucualt is wonderful and all, but his work has to be understood as historical philosophy and at times veering towards speculative metaphysics.) It's also helpful to keep in mind that you're not getting pure philosophical studies of knowledge with those thinkers, but studies that also give you a generous helping of ideology and prior political commitments. This alone is problematic, and would require an article itself to deal with. How they figure into his argument is a matter of connect-all-the-right-dots, I guess.
There are more things in this article that bother me, but those were some of the more outstanding problems that puzzled me. He makes some good points, like when me says "social media is like radio: It all depends on how you tune it." But even when you've tuned it, you gotta make sure you inspect the contents. When he writes about following a "stream of tweets from a political confrontation like Tahrir Square, a war zone like Gaza", anyone doing this has to keep in mind the following: Most tweets on events like these are actually opinions based on certified news-mediums, where the person tweeting is merely watching the event unfold on TV or reading about it via online news-articles. You don't really get "embedded" tweets from the front lines of Tripoli; they're too busy fighting government forces. You do get, however, someone like myself observing what everyone else has access to, where that person is simply expressing an opinion. Is Chomsky wrong? Understood correctly, no. Understood as a caricature, yes.
