…in Vanity Fair.

Here’s what he had to say about social media, which I thought was out-and-out brilliant:

Do you Twitter and pay attention to all of that?

No I don’t. I don’t Tweet because I can’t think of anything I’d want to discuss with somebody that I could explain in 25 words or less, 140 characters or whatever it is, nor would I be particularly interested in their answer. And I think it’s forcing people to think in these kinds of sound-bytes, and you can’t think in sound-bytes. But on the other hand it will all level out. [Zoologist] Desmond Morris could explain it easily: it’s just primate grouping—people just need to group. They just need to pick each other’s fur, and that’s what it is, all day long, all this Facebook, Twittering, and texting is all just primate social grooming, you know? And if it brings us closer together as a kind of a mobile consciousness and lets people think of each other that way, then it’s fine. Problem is I had this kind of idealistic view of what the Internet could be: that you could have friends in Spain and in China, and that you could be connected to people and their strife. I had friends working at orphanages in Burma and things like that and I’m sending them money. I thought, ‘Wow, the Internet can really combat tyranny. It can bring us together, it can give us an appreciation of other cultures.’ And unfortunately, that’s not how it works. The Internet is used so that people can find somebody out of the other six billion people in the planet that are just like them, and so it’s this self-organizing principle that puts you always with a reinforcing group, not a group that challenges you.

Posted via web from Adam Daniel Mezei’s posterous