"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress." (Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form)
Great quote someone posted to By Common Consent. I think it describes not only philosophical dialog, but especially internet communication.
I've been discussing and debating on the internet for years. Since way back before most people even knew there was an internet. Even though I was but a young teenager at the time, I still remember working all summer so as to buy one of the first Macs, getting a modem and somehow talking my way into a password on the university Vax which was connected to the Internet. Still the Internet has changed dramatically. Once Usenet (now usually read via Google groups) was interesting with helpful advice and little spam. Then the quacks got on the Internet and newsgroups were never the same. (Usually dated to around the time AOL started providing internet connections as part of their service)
While I was at college mailing lists started becoming a big thing. They had been around before via both email and UUCP. But they became even more useful and widely available. I was on most of the early LDS mailing lists: the original Mormon-L at BYU, Morm-Ant (focusing in on antiquities and history), and Scripture-L. Some got caught up turmoil. Mormon-L became taken over by liberal Mormon controversies and many stopped reading it. (It also moved from BYU servers, became if anything larger and is still around today I believe) Morm-Ant blew up in a big debate between a few folks from FARMS and a few folks from Signature. A precursor of the rather heated debates between the two over the following few years. It became SAMU-L and then eventually died off. (If I remember right - forgive me if I have the names backwards. I'm going by memory) Some new ones started up, such as Scripture-L focused on scripture analysis, Eyring-L focused on science and religion issues, and Morm-Hist, focused on history. I should add that in the mid-90's I actually ran both Eyring-L and Morm-Hist. Around the mid-90's Dennis Potter started up LDS-Phil. That was actually responsible for getting me re-interested in philosophy. (I'd come to have a rather negative view of it, despite nearly getting a philosophy major for a while) Some are still going strong, like LDS-Phil. Some are often quiet with occasional gusts of activity, like Eyring-L. Some appear for all intents and purposes to be dead, like Morm-Hist.
In the mid-90's things started changing. Email was still king, but new services like Gopher started up. (Sort of like a web browser, but far more limited) Then NSCA came out with their primitive browser and the web took off. Initially there were lots of resources. I had up what might be considered a kind of proto-personal blog at the time. (Mainly accounts of climbing, hiking and biking and other adventurous daring-do)
Now, the last couple of years blogs have taken off. Mine started about a year and a half ago, but only really got going strong about a year ago. The last month the number of blogs has sky-rocketed to where I can't even read all the LDS blogs or all the Philosophically oriented blogs. It really is amazing.
That ended coming off more pretentious than nostalgic as I'd intended. C'est la view. I was going to delete all my comments after the quote but decided not to. Still, the quote is great.
So what are you saying? I mean if you don't want comments why have the "post a comment" box at the end of each post? ;-)
Okay, Clark. Now you've quoted Kenneth Burke (whose ideas I used for my masters thesis). It is now your duty (a very serious duty) to read Kierkegaard so we can have an parlor discussion that lasts to the late hours. Hopefully before one of us departs. :)
By the way, interesting history of your involvement in the ongoing internet discussions.
It is interesting to see how the Internet's evolved. I've only recently started reading any blogs, and it was pretty overwhelming when I first saw just how infinite the bloggerverse really is. I don't even bother trying to keep up with most of it, there's just too much out there.
When the blogs I wanted to follow increased geometrically, I got overwhelmed. Then I found the remedy: an RSS Reader. Now I can efficiently follow many conversations that I have no capacity to join.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
and Theology
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Blogged by Clark Goble