Greetings Economists, On Mar 9, 2007, at 7:29 AM, Jim Devine wrote:
Further, people like to have _short_ conversations on topics that are _easy_ to discuss. For example, I tried to have a serious discussion of the Roemer & Skillman attacks on and alternatives to the Marxian theory of exploitation, but people didn't like the length of my posts and Gil said that no serious discussions were possible on e-mail discussion lists like pen-l. That opinion seems to be held by a lot of people. Pen-l is a place where people chat about things they can't talk about very much with liberals or reactionaries.
Doyle; I think this is very good analysis. One learns in more concise ways to clearly express oneself on these lists, but they are not serious content in the sense you were proposing about Roemer and Skillman. The value of social software though is the advance of collaboration tools to work on serious problems. Wikis to some degree illustrate in conventional encylopedic terms what collaboration can do over and above the historical one to many business models. But automation promises a great deal more about collaboration. I will list some values I think might come about; one - uniting the same topic across the planet and mobilizing millions at once to stabilize a topic. two - ground the discussions in the real world in relation to the issue of mobility in the world. Not possible in text only sources. three - unite the work in ways that chats don't. The flame wars are symptoms of lack of a emotion structure to the content which then constantly fissures and splits rather than unites and stabilizes. Doyle
