Noam Chomsky Quotes About Internet
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I think individuals have a right to privacy, but that ought to include the right to prevent private institutions from monitoring what you do and building up a personal profile for you so that they can direct you in particular ways by their effective control over the internet, and that doesn't happen of course.
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The internet is something created largely by public funding.
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Our whole educational and cultural system is not designed to provide those intellectual tools, so people are often lost and the internet often becomes kind of a cult generator.
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Somebody puts up some weird thing and somebody else thinks yeah maybe that's the way things work and pretty soon you have some cult going. Its not the fault of the internet, it's the fault of a social and culture system that doesn't educate people properly and in fact on purpose. They don't want to educate people properly.
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The big change, the really radical change in communication, was in the late 19th century. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph is astronomical. Everything since then has been small increments, including the internet.
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On the other hand, a lot of the internet - I don't know the percentage, but I am sure a great mass of internet use - is pretty superficial interaction amongst people. Its not necessarily a bad thing. A teenager wants to talk to her friend, that's fine, but I think it probably contributes to atomization, which is a threat to the society.
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The person who wins the Nobel Prize is not the person who read the most journal articles and took the most notes on them. It's the person who knew what to look for. And cultivating that capacity to seek what's significant, always willing to question whether you're on the right track - that's what education is going to be about, whether it's using computers and the Internet, or pencil and paper, or books.
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A lot of association on the internet is highly constructive. There are people interacting, interchanging ideas, making plans, coordinating activities; take any of the popular movements, a lot of the organization is through the internet. We want to have a demonstration or we want to have a meeting, its done through the internet. I think that's all to the good.
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Silicon Valley, after all, feeds off the existence of computers, the internet, the IT systems, satellites, the whole of micro electronics and so on, but a lot of that comes straight out of the state sector of the economy. Silicon Valley developed, but they expanded and turned it into commercial products and so on, but the innovation is on the basis of fundamental technological development that took places in places like this [MIT] on government funding, and that continues.
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I am not offering this is a critique of the internet, its just that there are a lot of factors involved. It does offer plenty of possibilities. It also has, it can have, a cheapening effect and I think both exist and I think its true of everything. You could say that about the printing press.
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The Internet is an élite organization; most of the population of the world has never even made a phone call.
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The internet, since it is publicly created, ought to be publicly controlled.
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[Internet] is kind of like a hammer. The technology itself doesn't determine how its used. It depends on the social, cultural and economic context in which the technology is made available.
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I don't know what it means to say that 'the internet should have a voice in Washington'.
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The big change, the really radical change in communication, was in the late 19th century. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph is astronomical. Everything since then has been small increments, including the internet. So you don't have to wait for a letter to get to England in six weeks, you have almost instant communication. That was an enormous shift.
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After all, the internet originated around 1960 and wasn't privatized until 1995. That's thirty five years in the public domain during the hard, creative development period.
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There are massive efforts on the part of the internet's corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.
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Like most technology, the internet has mixed effects. It's a neutral instrument.
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I don't have time, you know - I want to be able to get it [information] instantly on the internet and not have to think about it. Well, there is that phenomenon as well.
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It [the internet] should be publicly controlled but Washington is not a system of public control, it's mainly a system of corporate control. We ought to have a free internet, but that means having a free society, and there is fundamental questions there.
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The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society.
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As a research tool, the internet is invaluable.
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If you want to become a biologist, it doesn't help to go into the Harvard biology library and all the information is there for you. You have to know what to look for and the internet is the same, just magnified.
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People don't talk to each other. You're alone with your television set or internet. But you can't have a functioning democracy without what sociologists call "secondary organizations," places where people can get together, plan, talk and develop ideas. You don't do it alone.
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It [the internet] probably has the effect of weakening personal associations.
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