Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Serious On-Line Discussions
Around the year 2000-2001 I spend a year everyday in IRC Undernet in a channel called #philosophy run by a retired teacher with the handle "Skept" who strictly forbade ANY mention of religion or politics. One day I mentioned something about Kierkegaard and Skept booted me saying that my comment was too religious. When the mention of religion and politics is forbidden then much is lost. I edited and reposted (blogged) a number of the chat dialogues. What I discovered in IRC (and in Paltalk) is that very few people have the attention span to discuss anything in depth for several hours. I should include Yahoo religion chat rooms from 1999. People would always enter such rooms and say "What's the topic" and there were topics, but no one stayed on them very long or went very deeply or quoted extensively from source texts. And this is sad BECAUSE applications like IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and Paltalk provide the possibility for holding seminars. I could only find satisfaction in blogging long essays and interacting with the questions of occasional readers that came along.
