Metablog — actually going meta?
I chose the name “Metablog” because at the time my main projecty interest was in ways of improving the quality and pleasantness of blogospheric debates, which, of course, is a metablogoshperical-typed task. (ish.) But, as it happened, personal problems and the tides of fate intervened, and my interest and energy waned, and I haven’t made progress on the issue. And this post is not a turning point either. But I do think that, today, I’ve come to understand one thing that was keeping me from working on this more than was necessary.
The project was just too ambitious. I wanted to make it a “Wikipedia of dialectic”, which is to say, something reusable and referencable and incrementally add-to-it-able. But I realize now that it was defining the scope of a very big problem, when there was a much smaller subproblem that was sitting right there with nearly as much urgency and fun to it. I just need to start out with being able to properly model individual debates. I need to dissect them, at microscopic levels. That’s plenty of work, right there, and maybe even something I can accomplish with a little bit of work. Very boring work, perhaps.
Well, maybe even that’s too ambitious. Maybe I should just start with normal, non-contentious discourse. I don’t think I’ll care to analyze humor much, but starting out with things that don’t generate big long flame wars might make the project less overwhelming to begin with. Let me start practicing on the easy things.
If any of you readers have recommendations on books about this, (which I haven’t tried to look for, because I hate looking for this sort of thing, especially when the emphasis and direction I’m giving it has probably never been studied,) please let me know. And please, if you would, provide a synopsis of the author’s approach so I can try to evaluate whether it’s even close to my own, because I’m not willing to try to extract value from it otherwise. My interest in this subject, unlike so many others, isn’t for its own sake. I’m interested in discussion as a performance art, and I only want to model it like a musician would learn anatomy to improve their technique, or a social scientist would use math. (No offense intended to social scientists, honest!)
