This may come across as sour grapes over my previous couple of blogs being too long but I assure you it isn’t. Buut it did get me thinking about brevity and new media.
Noam Chomsky talks in this clip about brevity and concision on television – in relation to why he is rarely on mainstream tv in America.
To be (ironically) brief his argument is that if you were to say something unconventional you would need to provide more evidence to back it up and television doesn’t allow time for that. It structurally demands the repetition of conventional ideas.
But what about the new medium of the internet?
I would have thought that the enormous volume of information on the web would lead to more people reading and viewing more ideas and following up with investigation into more unconventional theories. Perhaps, in part, it does but generally that isn’t what the net is being used for.
Instead the most popular internet platforms seem to demand even more concision and brevity. Whether it be Facebook ‘news’ feeds or Twitter or the Sky News website there is a requirement to be brief or you lose peoples’ interest.
Let’s have a go. I’ll see if I can say something worth saying in the 140 word limit Twitter allows:
“the mainstream press is complicit in the promotion of an ideology that has caused untold deaths globally. Capitalism, through a subtle use o…”
“all drugs should be made legal as the war on drugs has clearly not succeeded in combating the use of narcotics and has simply made multi mil…”
“The profusion of surveillance in our society is a sign of a totalitarian state being stealthily imposed upon the population under the guise …”
Hey, this is fun! Facetious fun. Let’s start a new game!
I’m well aware that information is available if you look for it but that’s part of the trick of the manufacture of consent. You can find things out but ‘they’ know that without a properly functioning fourth estate or education system the majority won’t look.
They’ll go to Jade Goody’s funeral instead.
Hey ho.
PS anyone who wants to see more about Chomsky can watch an excellent film about him here.
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The main problem I have with Noam Chomsky is that he has allowed himself to get dragged into the wrong side on the Holocaust Denialt argument. It is totally ridiculous to say that Chomsky denies that the Holocaust took place but by signing the petition in defence of Robert Faurisson making the ludicrous statement that the gas chambers did not exist, Chomsky has allowed his good name to be forever tarnished by these fucking arseholes who will try and convince reasonable people that an event of historical fact did not exist. By doing this he has been used within the IHR.org website and within other filthy organisations as a learned scholar who doesnt believe that the Holocaust existed. Chomsky was only protecting freedom of speech ,ordinarily a noble cause, but he has fallen into an easy trap of protecting a lie. If 50,000 words in a report say, are produced on the Holocaust and 50 of those words cast a slight doubt that an event within the Holocaust existed whereas the other 49,950 words validate the truth that the Holocaust existed, then these 50 words will be seized upon by Holocaust deniers creating historical inaccuracy. That is not freedom of speech that is an attempt to distort the truth and by protecting this freedom to spill filthy lies about such an horrendous event, Chomsky has done far more harm than good and such a great mind as his should have known better, it is obvious what would happen. You end up being used within every Holocaust denial book and website as validation of this mass lie. He should have known better
I don’t personally see it as my job to defend everything Chomsky’s said and done. But two things regarding the episode with Faurisson.
First of all, as far as I understand it, his only support of the man and his opinions was regarding his right to freedom of speech. Chomsky’s position is that you can have only two positions on it – you either defend everyone’s right to say whatever they want – or you don’t. Only the former position makes you a defender of freedom of speech. I think it was Voltaire who said something like, ‘I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it”
The other issue I would focus on is that Chomsky is a prominent (maybe the prominent) anti-israeli jew. This makes him the focus of orchestrated campaigns by Zionists to discredit him where they feel they can. Before responding to that bare in mind that Zionism is a racial supremacist cult. Criticism of Zionism is not anti semetic. The fact that I feel I have to qualify myself by making that last statement is, in this regard, significant in itself.
The film I linked above has a section on the faurisson case – or you can see that clip here:
It ends with the quote from Chomsky:
“it is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers”
And amen to that.