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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.

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."

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.

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.