Thursday, November 24, 2005

Nicholas Carr worries about the end of Western Civilization as we know it


Experiencing the blogosphere feels a lot like intellectual hydroplaning - skimming along the surface of many ideas, rarely going deep. It's impressionistic, not contemplative. Fun? Sure. Invigorating? Absolutely. Socratic? I'm not convinced.


I think he's missing the point.

Socrates was just some guy (a stone-mason) who wandered around picking arguments with people in the market-place. He fisked his opponents with nit-picking fine-grained carping over details; made all sorts of outrageous anti-commonsensical claims - which an echo-chamber of dittoheads all dumbly agreed with; never respected any formal learning institutions or professionalism; and annoyed most people to the point of wanting to kill him.

How do you get more blog than that?

Yet this is the basis of Western civilization.

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