I tend to believe that the way that social networking has evolved, is structured, and tends to function, it works very contrary to any form of serious debate on any subject. Perhaps that is its very purpose, to damage and destroy any real potential for serious meaningful dialogue among genuine persons. At least that is the trend. A quagmire of tweets, brief acknowledgements of existence, the sort of passing comments that pervaded locker rooms and playgrounds at recess, during schooling, without much more substance or any real depths of thought. I recall, around 1989 and into the first half of the 1990s, when I could connect with the fledgling internet, at 300 baud, via a 40Kb program called "Rosemail Door" and chance into real discourse, on real subjects, with people whom I never otherwise would have met. I had discourse with a professor of philsophy, a military psychiatrist, physicists, practitioners or lovers of the arts, and many others, with discussions to which there are no parallels today. In contrast to those days of intellectual, personal, freedom these times seem a prison of extreme constraint and futility. No where is there anything comparable to what happened via the Rosemail door in terms of human dialogue that had some substance and meaning.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:20:19 +0000
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