Singer/songwriter Sylvia Tyson was half of Ian & Sylvia and is a quarter of the folk group Quartette. She is author of the novel Joyner's Dream .
Why is the wired world a problem for you?
Everybody is being dumbed down. We are bombarded constantly. It's more and more about less and less. Concentration is being totally disrupted and shortened.
How involved in the wired world are you?
You're talking to the original Luddite. I don't have a cellphone. I have a BlackBerry, but I don't use it. It was given to me. Actually, with what I'm doing for my book, I'm probably going to have to get a cellphone simply so people can reach me.
Will that start the process of Sylvia Tyson's being "dumbed down"?
No. Dumbed down has more to do with the use of computers.
Do you multitask?
I multitask in the old-fashioned way. I'm cooking dinner and reading a book and taking phone calls. I think women have been multitasking for generations.
To put your total concentration on one thing and do it right is important. I see this being important in the age of American Idol. The kids who want to get into music now don't want to learn to play music, they want to be stars. Whatever they have to do to deserve that is not in the equation.
Everything fast, easy and superficial: What's wrong with that?
Everything is disposable. Even music doesn't last long . Buy it. Get over it. Get rid of it. Get the next big thing.
Most great things in society – invention, art, science, even personal awareness – are enabled by quiet time alone with one's thoughts. Are we are losing that?
I walk in the mornings and that's my thinking time, my writing time. I see people in the ravines, walking in nature and they have headphones and they're making phone calls. They have to be in touch all the time, oblivious to their surroundings.
I know for myself, if I didn't have that time, I'd go nuts. That is how I do what I do. How I write what I write.
When babies are born, they have a minimal attention span, ever distracted by something new. As they mature, their attention span broadens and develops – or is forced on them. Is a short attention span a natural state of affairs?
One develops one's attention span, hopefully, in the way that one develops anything else. The way that one gets teeth, develops strength and abilities. Dumbing down is being returned to that infantile stage.
Is it the same with language? Tweets condense the language to almost unrecognizable English without vowels or punctuation.
Not only condensed. A lot has been lost because people are not reading as much. They're not gaining that vocabulary.
Letters from past centuries are often eloquent and rich in flowing language and thought. If each generation writes ever more briefly and superficially, are we headed to communication by monosyllables – grunts and shrugs?
We're not just going to lose that ability, we're going to lose history. You can read those old letters and know what it was like and know what was going on on a very personal level. If people cease to write in that way, with that length and emotion, then there's a period of time that's going to be kind of a blank after a while. None of that information will have been kept.
A lot of stuff has, sadly, been lost in the name of political correctness.
Is political correctness dumbing down?
In some cases, it is. It allows people to tell you how you should be thinking. It allows people not to have to think about what they're talking about. A lot of what happens in the wired world is the acceptance and proliferation of ignorance. Accepting somebody else's point of view rather than developing one of your own.
I see so many young people the minute they do something, they tweet all of their friends. Their friends tell them whether they have done the right thing or the wrong thing or they should be doing something else. It robs self-determination. The minute you get a thought, you are instantly tweeting somebody for their reaction.
You've just published your first novel. Is that going counter to the trend?
I was told novels were not in fashion. I guess I was bucking the trend. It didn't matter to me. I've always been a brat, truth be known, and I do what I want to.
A positive sign is that some kids are reading more. Whatever some might think of the Harry Potter books, they're getting kids to read.
How did dumbing down happen to us? Does it speak to human nature? Do we really want merely shallow, cheap and easy?
It's happened to us slowly. We all love fast food. What can I say? It doesn't mean it's good for us.