A funny story, and a philosophical questions
So, I've been in this community for a while, not counting the period of time when I was banned. In that time I've been an undergraduate studying philosophy in cognitive science, been working at a tech company and reading a respectable amount of philosophy on the side. Now I am in grad school at a program that is roughly "about the internet" but from an interdisciplinary perspective. It's going to let me engage in a lot of questions that are 'philosophical' in a loose sense of the word.
I have opportunities to bring up this community at least once a week. I have the opportunity to bring up stuff I've learned in this community, or because of this community, hell almost every day. It scares the shit out of my professors, who don't know where I got the background to lay down the law on, say, Kant (which just about ends any argument I get into). They certainly don't know I've never read The Critique of Pure Reason.
So, first, I wanted to thank everyone who has participated here over the years. I especially want to thank anosognosia, who has been such a dedicated community member and patient teacher for so long. But I also, not without sustained grudge but out of sincerity, want to thank apperception and mendaciloquent for, well, being dedicated community members and teachers, in their dickish way.
I have them to blame for the fact that, for example, I've implied in a class email thread that our historical linguist professor was acting in his class interests by attempting to historicize technical terminology, thereby placing him in a mediating role between technology and the public. I've suggested that the department will experience a shift in class consciousness away from bourgeois scholarship and towards a more proletarian view as more people with background in open source development move into academia and shift it towards an open publishing model.
Meanwhile, a class discussion of Habermas leads me to go on rants about Lukacs and the Frankfurt school where I get away with speculation about why Adorno might not have liked Habermas' thesis about the structure of the public sphere. (Because, obviously, he's espousing a notion of the public sphere rooted in transcendental reason, which is tacitly admitting the superiority of the bourgeoisie!)
Shocking what I get away with, really.
Another place this comes up is in courses on "Computer Mediated Communication" and a surrounding discourse on trolling. You may recall that this community used to be rife with accusations of trolling, trolling used as a justification for banning, trolling necessitating the spawning of new communities with alternative definitions of trolling, questions of what happens when the moderators are trolls.
These stories are invaluable, because there is semi-serious but probably growing into a real academic question of what the hell is trolling, anyway. There are colleagues of mine who have made, quite seriously, claims that "the future of the digital humanities is trolling" or "trolling is the new critique".
This is ironic considering that some of the biggest trolls on this forum were people denying the cultural significance of the internet. Mendy, for example, is a grouch who has quit society to live on a farm and dares to not give a shit about xkcd but really the logs of this community or faux_philosophy are a gold mine for somebody interested in early philosophical work on the definition of trolling. From an academic perspective, it's a real shame that just_philosophy got deleted, but so it goes.
Wait, but "this isn't really philosophy"? For real? You're going to pull that line? It's my turn to say: grow up. History and philosophy are now obviously being shaped by information technology and there is no reason to deny it if one has even the slightest trace of, say, Hegelian sympathies. "Trolling" is an example of a concept that has emerged due to material conditions in society and is having an effect on our self-consciousness as individuals and in society.
So, if you'll forgive the personal comments and the rant, I wanted to open up a subject for the maybe three people that still participate in this forum:
What is a troll?
Open proposal: let's talk about it for a while, write a paper on it, and put it somewhere up on the internet, proudly. I guarantee you that it will become widely cited. I think that we are the world's premier experts on the philosophy of trolling and dammit we should act on that. If we don't do it now, somebody else will. Or, alternatively, I will do some really gnarly text mining on the community logs and do it myself.
I have opportunities to bring up this community at least once a week. I have the opportunity to bring up stuff I've learned in this community, or because of this community, hell almost every day. It scares the shit out of my professors, who don't know where I got the background to lay down the law on, say, Kant (which just about ends any argument I get into). They certainly don't know I've never read The Critique of Pure Reason.
So, first, I wanted to thank everyone who has participated here over the years. I especially want to thank anosognosia, who has been such a dedicated community member and patient teacher for so long. But I also, not without sustained grudge but out of sincerity, want to thank apperception and mendaciloquent for, well, being dedicated community members and teachers, in their dickish way.
I have them to blame for the fact that, for example, I've implied in a class email thread that our historical linguist professor was acting in his class interests by attempting to historicize technical terminology, thereby placing him in a mediating role between technology and the public. I've suggested that the department will experience a shift in class consciousness away from bourgeois scholarship and towards a more proletarian view as more people with background in open source development move into academia and shift it towards an open publishing model.
Meanwhile, a class discussion of Habermas leads me to go on rants about Lukacs and the Frankfurt school where I get away with speculation about why Adorno might not have liked Habermas' thesis about the structure of the public sphere. (Because, obviously, he's espousing a notion of the public sphere rooted in transcendental reason, which is tacitly admitting the superiority of the bourgeoisie!)
Shocking what I get away with, really.
Another place this comes up is in courses on "Computer Mediated Communication" and a surrounding discourse on trolling. You may recall that this community used to be rife with accusations of trolling, trolling used as a justification for banning, trolling necessitating the spawning of new communities with alternative definitions of trolling, questions of what happens when the moderators are trolls.
These stories are invaluable, because there is semi-serious but probably growing into a real academic question of what the hell is trolling, anyway. There are colleagues of mine who have made, quite seriously, claims that "the future of the digital humanities is trolling" or "trolling is the new critique".
This is ironic considering that some of the biggest trolls on this forum were people denying the cultural significance of the internet. Mendy, for example, is a grouch who has quit society to live on a farm and dares to not give a shit about xkcd but really the logs of this community or faux_philosophy are a gold mine for somebody interested in early philosophical work on the definition of trolling. From an academic perspective, it's a real shame that just_philosophy got deleted, but so it goes.
Wait, but "this isn't really philosophy"? For real? You're going to pull that line? It's my turn to say: grow up. History and philosophy are now obviously being shaped by information technology and there is no reason to deny it if one has even the slightest trace of, say, Hegelian sympathies. "Trolling" is an example of a concept that has emerged due to material conditions in society and is having an effect on our self-consciousness as individuals and in society.
So, if you'll forgive the personal comments and the rant, I wanted to open up a subject for the maybe three people that still participate in this forum:
What is a troll?
Open proposal: let's talk about it for a while, write a paper on it, and put it somewhere up on the internet, proudly. I guarantee you that it will become widely cited. I think that we are the world's premier experts on the philosophy of trolling and dammit we should act on that. If we don't do it now, somebody else will. Or, alternatively, I will do some really gnarly text mining on the community logs and do it myself.