Another Podcast

I'm 24mins in, and taking a break. I was wondering, do you think online discussion has become more shallow? I mean the infrastructure. My sense is, discussion forums, as a thing, have more or less withered or have been crowded out by something. Something I don't know. It could be my perception. I know from experience that independently operating a user-generated website is very difficult, because of SPAM. I sometimes wonder, if governments and or commercial interests are generating spam, as a kind of measure to keep the WWW from being too friendly to organic expansion. It just doesn't seem lucrative. But that's an aside. There has always been services for hosting forums. So the SPAM argument, is weak I think. What I mean, is forums offer a place for deep discussion, comments are implicitly not for discussion; it's sad actually to watch people try to use a comments-section of a website to manufacture a makeshift discussion forum. Something like Twitter is perhaps for discussion, but if so, it's an unnatural form of discussion. My experience with discussion forums was not exactly positive. I think it would always come down to the moral center of the administrator. If they even had one. Because you'd have a lot of people, that feel like they have a "community." And on one level that can be a very beautiful thing, but on the other it can be very destructive, as emotions take the place of sound managerial policy of the common space. Time and again, I'd watch forums where you'd witness a mob form, to ice out a scapegoat. Run them out on a rail. The members seemed to find purpose and meaning in the mob. (E.g.: a sense of belonging.) If the administrators were not impartial, were not fair to the scapegoat de jure, you could see there was no moral backbone there. I guess, in a way, a forum in my view is totalitarian: make or break on how keen the owners are to be fair. I think the only sound policy is one that does not permit expressions of a personal nature. That is, if the forum is not impersonal, by fiat, it won't stand. It will swell and buckle under its own weight. But I'm not sure it matters, because in many ways, <i>the</i> forum seems like a dinosaur. All but extinct. But I don't know if I'm in any position to call that. It's just my sense. Yours? EDITED: Maybe "swell and buckle" is mixing metaphor. I think I mean something like tendency to a Lord of the Flies effect, in the absence of principled leadership (i.e. ownership.) Sorry, I've flubbed my words this time :( It happens :)

Michael