That’s crap. You don’t get out much. I can link to dozens of conservative sites with comments. Ever notice that the Kos site and DU require registration, preview, and censor comments?

Just curious, but is anyone discussing the Greeks a St. John’s College grad?

His conversations were not the two-way debates you might expect. Socratic dialogue in Plato typically involved Socrates asking a leading question, a suitably curt yes/no type response from his respondee, then paragraphs of flowery prose as Socrates shows off. (Thank you Stephen C for outlining the irony of this much more eloquently than I can)

Shouldn’t books and newspapers be regarded as a conversation anyway? Certainly academic journals are or were when I studied. I think the real distinction here is that previously authors would only countenance discussion within the narrow confines of certain publications and from certain authors or journalists of a similar stature, not from any Tom, Dick, Harry or Jeff on the internet.

Good journalists should be humble in their approach and willing to engage with others. I work in PR - I live and breathe my subject every day and have far more intimate knowledge of it than anyone external to my business can hope for. Granted I’m paid to give my company’s view so have an agenda, but the best journalists I deal with are willing to listen, to look at the facts and debate (just as the best PRs should). The form of that interaction is irrelevant - be it in books, journals, newspapers or blogs - but the willingness to have it is the key.

JF

I have no love of the printed establishment, and your right to say that the printed form may be outdated. But to elevate blogging to the same stature as civil debate and conversation is plain wrong. What goes on with blogging - publish a post, recieve a comment, publish reply to comment - is a correspondence. It may be called a psuedo conversation at best. To converse with someone is in essence to know them. Socrates does not just engage with anonymous people, these were people he knew, people he could relate to. The internet offers no such knowledge of the conversers, and as such the anonymity that is there is a barrier to true conversation. The post and reply format only mimics conversation.

The moment that this is considered conversation, particularly as Socrates revered it, is the moment that society has fallen.

The effort was aided by the creation of a series of well-funded “think tanks”. Some detailed research on this will reveal that most keep their donors obscured as much as possible, but that when enough digging is done it turns out that the same key players surface again and again. Names like Scaife, Ahmanson and Olin are often the principle sponsors.

So while the left was using the ideas of open debate in the academy the right was setting up a series of propaganda organs disguised as academic institutions. This was combined with several influential poltical magazines which also owe their existence to wealthy plutocrats like William Buckley.

The power of this technique can be seen in the history of the estate tax debate. Just 18 super wealthy families have provided most of the funding for the pseudo-scholarly barrage that has occurred over the past decade. They can afford to spend $100 million on the effort when the returns from abolishing the estate tax are in the range of $80 billion.

So the ideas didn’t win out on their merit, they were pushed on the public by a well-funded, secretive effort.

While there is much to be said for “conversation”, it is simply untrue that the ancient medium of writing somehow discouraged involvement and collaboration between peers. The premodern book included not only the original text but layers upon layers of commentary as well — what began simply as marginalia blossomed over the centuries into ever-expanding rings of commentary, a proto-blogosphere of critics arguing across both time and space. Whereas this conversation was dutifully reproduced as each manuscript was copied (the scribes often weighing in themselves as they did so!) through antiquity into the middle ages and even the advent of moveable type, modern publishing houses deemed it ancillary to the texts themselves and banished it from all but the most esoteric of print runs. Even a legitimate scholar has a difficult time today recovering the totality of this exchange!

As for Homer, some have argued that it was Homer himself who ended the great epic tradition by “remixing” the oral poetry of old into something altogether new by means of the written word. This would make him not a traditional rhapsode or a self-conscious author but something in between.

Plato/Socrates had an ax to grind with the art of writing for a good reason — literacy enabled democracy, and as a man who favored aristocracy (literally the “rule of the best”), this phenomenon which held people accountable to something other than the ever-changing whim of the sovereign and those whom he favored could only come back to bite the ruling class in the ass. In fact, one of the most important words in the realm of ancient Athenian jurisprudence — graphomai, to indict — literally means to “write someone up”. Did you know that the Athenians of old were more litigious than us Americans? I’m sure that Plato was all too mindful of the fact that his mentor Socrates was put to death by the Athenian justice system, which in the hands of a democratic mob was a very dangerous tool indeed! No wonder the guy had it in for books.

Aside from his antidemocratic tendencies, Plato was not too terribly fond of “free speech”, either — something I mentioned in a previous thread about teenage sex and Elvis.

McLuhan, among others, said the alphabet and print fostered and encouraged a fragmentation, a process of specialism and detachment whereas wired technologies foster and encourage involvement. While others have made the obvious comment regarding Socrates (never wrote a word) what has been missed was his notion that learning required thinking and thinking required active discourse. The book brought an end to a once great oral tradition that began, perhaps, with Homer (who also never wrote a word).

Another thing to consider: written language makes possible many key elements of our society. For example, our legal system depends on written laws and other texts that can be accessed and understood by all, and that don’t change. While court cases depend on discourse, the law itself depends on written words.

I think it’s silly to position one aspect of communication and language above another. All are important. Perhaps networks allow for the rebirth of of discourse.

This is why non-Republicans have organized themselves into a talking medium, the blogs, a space where right wing talking can not shout out thought, although some fanatical right wing trolls certainly try to misdirecet and vandalise conversations by picking fights in comment threads. Notice how most pro republican blogs do not have comment threads. That way no feedback can occur. They don’t need it as they did 30 years ago since their foundational ideas and concepts are well understood. A person with a republican frame of mind has learned to know what to think about an event when it occurs. He has internalised the view.

Once the non-republican conversation established enough weight to push back the Republican converstation, then the American public will be able to hear a political converstion again. Until then we will have two sealed spheres with chaos in between. The right wing sphere sealed by choice and the non-republican sphere sealed by necessity.

But there are two reasons why books are good things that need to resist being sucked into the instant-comment mode of the blogosphere.

One is, the nature of the discourse. To pick one example and I’m sure everyone can think of 100 more. Paul Berman researches Sayyid al-Qutb, he thinks about the nature of fascism, he writes a terrific book called Terror and Liberalism– and a blogger immediately posts:

“so I gueSs Paul Buttman is now blowing George W. Bu$hitler”

A good book really shouldn’t be thought of as being equal to that. Of course I know the opposite exists, the pompous empty book punctured in 250 smart blogged words. But generally speaking, a lot more goes into a book than a blog entry, and it’s not fair to regard them as equally weighted combatants.

Second is, I resist the idea that books should be forced to adapt to our real-time commentary culture. Sure, most books are of the moment, but the books that really matter often take 25 years to be read and absorbed. And that’s a good thing.

I grant that I’m talking about the exception, the cream of the crop. Most books are as disposable as most blog posts. But the culture of the book has its advantages, too, and let’s be careful not to toss them away.

However, there is something about a written work which has been labored over for some period of time, polished and presented as a coherent whole which is missing from online conversations.

Even with written works mechanisms have been found to incorporate commentary. Take a look at Jewish scholarship where the commentaries surround the text.

Let’s not get carried away with the power of the instantaneous world, some ideas take time to develop. Of course you are going to teach journalism not scholarly research.

The real threat these days is the suppression of information by the government with or without the co-operation of the media, as your comments on Keller illustrate.

Exactly! Who better! Except, Jeff, that Socrates didn’t conduct that dialogue!. It was constructed as a philosophical dialogue and written down by Plato. The reason why you can quote it is because it exists, in writing, and it doesn’t transmit what Socrates said, but uses Socrates as a character to transmit Plato’s ideas.

Socrates did not write one word. And you know what, all of Socrates ideas died with him. Know one actually knows what Socrates said. I studied Philosophy, so I have read a bit about this. Sure, we think that Plato’s early dialogues (of which Phaedrus is not among) and some other dialogues by Xenophon do have some traces what Socrates’ ideas, but even these exist only because they were written down. You can only cite Phaedrus which supposedly critiques writing, because it was in fact written down

And here comes the great Platonic irony. The great reason why Plato has not gone out of fashion is because his dialogues continue to speak, and often. No one position is ever fixed: how can Plato discredit writing, and yet at the same time do so in writing? Writing must, therefore, have a benefit. You have to understand that that entire dialogue is so completely tongue-in-cheek it resists such a superficial reading.

When a culture dies, its ideas die, unless they are written down. Egypt, for instance, is a great example. No followers of its religion exist, and for thousands of years its culture was dead–until we deciphered its hieroglyphics, through which their philosophy, theology and poetic art came alive again. Greece itself comes to us, not through talking, but through their writing.

Books were always in the conversation. And don’t take my philosophical critique too seriously, I do in the end agree with you about blogs and the Internet etc etc. However, the dialogue did exist, it just existed more slowly: Plato->Aristotle->Stoics->Cicero->Augustine->Aquinas->Descartes….. (of course this list is not exhaustive). Perhaps this is more apparent to those on the Continent, considering the way philosophy is taught in Anglo-American tradition.