Tonycurzonprice's Favorite Links on forums from Diigo

Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet Communities (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 14:13:04 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don't contribute).
9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don't have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they're commenting on occurs.

Tags: communities forums participation

Posted by: tonycurzonprice

Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism by Steven B. Smith, an excerpt

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 05:03:32 -0000

Comments:

strauss views debate as a way of obfuscating, layering, masking the truth posted by tonycurzonprice

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Was its source in Plato’s artful use of the Socratic dialogue to convey various meanings to different readers without actually speaking in his own name?

Tags: debate forums speech

Posted by: tonycurzonprice

Jurgen Habermas - Mitchell Stephens

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 12:38:02 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

"I think that a certain form of unrestrained communication brings to the fore the deepest force of reason, which enables us to overcome egocentric or ethnocentric perspectives and reach an expanded . . . view."

unrestrained communication has a magical, group-making quality posted by tonycurzonprice

So the battle lines have been drawn. Habermas, says Martin Jay, a history professor at UC Berkeley, is "a bulwark against some of the more problematic strains in postmodern thought." Habermas' book "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity" defends modernism against the prefix that presumes to outdate it and criticizes various postmodern demigods -- including Foucault and Mr. Deconstruction, Jacques Derrida. Rather than going beyond modernism, he argues, some of them have just wandered off on some of its more "negative" and "empty" byways.

"I have always been mystified by the attention that Habermas receives," Fish says. "His way of thinking about these matters seems to me to be obviously faulty. The only way I can explain it to myself is that Habermas represents something that a lot of people would like to buy into: He seems to offer a way out of corrosive relativism."

The Enlightenment, you see, left open a crucial question: How does reason -- at whose behest so much has been challenged -- justify itself? Reason has undercut our belief in the spiritual, in the traditional. What is to prevent reason from challenging reason? Why, in other words, should we believe in reason? In "communicative action," Habermas thinks he has come up with an answer.

Reason, he maintains, is crucial to clear communication. So, to oversimplify a little, if we believe in the importance of the universal human impulse to communicate, we have to believe in reason. The Enlightenment, Habermas concludes, continues to have "a sound core."

In our "communicative actions," the right sees selfish individuals struggling to get a leg up on each other; the postmodern left sees the powerful exploiting the powerless; but Habermas sees, of all things, a kind of cooperation. Indeed, he shares with Socrates an almost utopian belief in the wholesomeness of debate and discussion.

"Habermas believes human social life rests on our capacity to have more or less clear communication with each other." We communicate -- to paraphrase Descartes -- therefore our society exists.

Tags: forums habermas speech

Posted by: tonycurzonprice

Hannah Arendt

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 12:17:03 -0000

Comments:

the signal - in speech or action - is only about the self in so far as it is not tied or directed to other ends posted by tonycurzonprice

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

It is thus only in action and speech, in interacting with others through words and deeds, that individuals reveal who they personally are and can affirm their unique identities. Action and speech are in this sense very closely related because both contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: “Who are you?” This disclosure of the “who” is made possible by both deeds and words, but of the two it is speech that has the closest affinity to revelation. Without the accompaniment of speech, action would lose its revelatory quality and could no longer be identified with an agent. It would lack, as it were, the conditions of ascription of agency.

Tags: arendt forums freedom speech

Posted by: tonycurzonprice