Social Software as Experimental Philosophy

From Clay Shirky's talk at Etech (via Ross Mayfield):

Social software is the experimental wing of political philosophy, a discipline that doesn't realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools.

The philosophical experiment is also structural, I think. We don't talk enough about how our communication tools shape what it is we end up saying with them. I can't cite the source, but I remember once reading the remarks of a book editor who was talking twenty years ago about the impact word processing was having on the American novel. He said, in essence, that the quality had improved greatly at the paragraph level (all that fiddling and deleting and rewriting), but that the overall structure of novels seemed to have suffered a bit from authors trying to keep hold of the big picture through the tiny window of the screen. (If my timeline is correct, the short story blossomed around this time.)

I think the same can be said not only for what and how we write, but for what we say and think. Writing online keeps some of the characteristics of conversation, while introducing a bit of the formality of writing. Before this, all was either dialogue or reflection, but never both. Now, well, there's a kind of languid, thoughtful immediacy to it all. Conversation is more constructive and less competitive online, and writing is more concentrated and purposeful, while at the same time less structured than writing for "publication". And because of all that furious linking, there's a sense of passing knowledge along, which makes the communication a lot like older storytelling traditions, to circle 'round a bit.

And to circle back 'round to Shirky's comment: To some extent "freedom of speech" is structural--you can have all the freedom to speak in the world, but if you don't have a tongue, or a pen, or a typewriter, and someone to listen, a lot of good it'll do ya. More tools, more listeners = more/better freedom. We tend to think of freedom, politically, as being about rights, but it can also be talked about as a matter of access. The greatest accomplishment of the internet will be the gradual replacement of the idea of freedom-as-a-right with freedom-as-a-technology. Now that's a political philosophy shift.

Tags: Shirky, Etech, political philosophy, writing, internet, freedom of speech, freedom

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