Techdirt Podcast Episode 148: The Lost Art Of Productive Debate
from the discourse-on-discourse dept
Even those of us who believe that the internet is overall a tremendous positive force when it comes to discourse and culture can admit that, in many parts of the online world (and really the world in general), having constructive and substantive conversations is... difficult. And that issue has most certainly come to the fore in the last couple of years. So this week, we're joined by author Barry Eisler (one of our first and most frequent podcast guests) to tackle the challenge of framing important debates in productive ways, and actually getting somewhere with them.
Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: barry eisler, debate, podcast
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
it rapidly deteriorated to net neutrality issues. I learned that people who object generally to government market regulation cannot be reasoned with and must be automatically ignored. "productive debate" is not possible with those who disagree with conventional political views.
"Framing the Debate" is indeed critical to progressive argumentation -- it allows one to casually dismiss the inconvenient viewpoints of others.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
I Dont Know What Your Complaining About
[ link to this | view in thread ]
And this is so surprising! Think of all the websites with good discussion tooling! Tooling for personalized filtering and ranking of comments, with a rich rule vocabulary over authors, topics, and discussion characteristics. To prevent interference effects between subcommunities, eternal septembers, loss of domain experts, and regression of exceptional sites to the mean (reddit). Tooling for long-term collaborative progress, so comments aren't ephemeral bar talk, unheard unless you enter the chatter at just the right moment, and then as often reread as last week's trashy newspaper.
Think of all the websites with good discussion tooling! Thousands! Err, a few? Well, I'm sure there's at least one out there. Somewhere?
Computer-supported collaborative discourse is a thing. One largely neglected for three decades now. Poorly funded (making current government complaints of nonexistence rather ironic.) But even what we know how to do, we don't pursue.
So how surprising is it that the web poorly supports constructive and substantive conversations? We, the tech community, are just not trying.
Tooling. Like podcasts on SoundCloud supporting high-speed (1.5 or 2x) playback, so listening to slow conversational speech is bearable. People have only been asking for that for, what, half a decade now? Tooling. Like a comment format that supports strikethrough. Unlike this one. Tooling.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Response to: Anonymous Coward on Dec 19th, 2017 @ 5:10pm
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
I learned that people who object generally to government market regulation cannot be reasoned with and must be automatically ignored.
If that's what you got out of the podcast, you did not actually listen to the podcast and are a part of the problem that we discuss.
[ link to this | view in thread ]