(no subject)

[fpb]

Whether everyone has or has not the right to their own opinion is a moot point. The problem with the internet is that everyone has the faculty to express an opinion - however ill-informed, moronic, perverse or demonstrably wrong. The brain-sick have been empowered, and the rest of us spend more time than we would wish trying to repair the damage they do.

Comments

[sanscouronne.livejournal.com]

I suppose we could say that this is one downside to mass literacy, as well as cheap access to communications technology. (This is not to say that times were necessarily better when only the elite were literate.)

[fishlivejournal.livejournal.com]

Urban legends, 'universal truisms' and pigheaded ignorance have had millennia to build up; it would be a bit much to expect them to disappear overnight. The internet has allowed people to talk to others they would never have met beforehand; over time (and I mean generations) that culture clash should rip away huge amounts of human stupidity.
of course, fresh stupidities will spring up to replace them, but that's just human nature.

"Kierkegaard On The Internet"

[southindian.livejournal.com]

Have you read Hubert Dreyfus' paper titled, "Kierkegaard On The Internet?" It's also the last chapter in his book, On The Internet.

There are two slightly differing versions of this paper on the internet:

Kierkegaard on the Internet

Kierkegaard on the Information Highway (Switch to ISO-8859-1 character encoding for this one to avoid seeing those � diamond shaped characters with a "?" inside them.)

Here's a small quotation from the introduction of the paper:

Kierkegaard thought that the Public Sphere, as implemented in the Press, promoted risk-free anonymity and idle curiosity that undermined responsibility and commitment. This, in turn, leveled all qualitative distinctions and led to nihilism, he held.

Kierkegaard might well have denounced the Internet for the same reasons. I will spell out Kierkegaard’s likely objections by considering how the Net promotes Kierkegaard’s two nihilistic spheres of existence, the aesthetic and the ethical, while repelling the religious sphere.

Re: "Kierkegaard On The Internet"

[southindian.livejournal.com]

The second edition of the book is also on Google Books (as a preview version, of course.) On The Internet, 2nd Edition