Now that the On-line Philosophy Conference (OPC) is starting to wind down, I have been thinking about the relationship between philosophy and technology. Blogs, internet encyclopedias, PhD program rankings, research databases, as well as on-line texts, papers, journals, and now conferences place a vast amount of information at our fingertips, thereby speeding up the pace with which philosophy can be done. Consider, for instance, one of the papers from the OPC that received the most attention–namely, Joshua Knobe and Erica Roedder’s "The Concept of Valuing: Experimental Studies" (with commentary by Antti Kauppinen). At a traditional conference, Knobe and Roedder would only have time to field a handful of questions–and several of those would typically be brief and clarificatory. And in the event that someone from the audience does have a probing question, the author(s) usually lack sufficient time for formulating an adequate response. With on-line formats, on the other hand, both the feedback authors receive on their work and the replies they formulate are both more immediate and more well-developed. In the case of the comment thread for the paper by Knobe and Roedder, 47 comments were posted in what turned out to be a very productive exchange between the authors and their supporters and critics. I, for one, enjoyed watching the ebb and flow of the dialectic as people tried to work their way through the authors’ paper as well as the excellent commentary and authors’ reply.
Given the wide scale accessibility of philosophy on-line these days, when philosophers have what they take to be an interesting new problem or idea, they can fast-track it to the public domain to see whether it will sink or swim. What may at one time have taken months or even years to determine–namely, whether a particular argument or line of research is worth pursuing–can be settled markedly faster now that the marketplace of ideas is on-line. As someone pointed out to me in an email correspondence, with the internet, "it takes no time at all for the idea to get out there and no time at all for it to be assessed by the rest of the discipline and, in turn, for everyone to see what that assessment is. There is no place to hide. No way to bluff. No excuses. This changes everything. Philosophy will prosper but the vaudeville of philosophical conferences and print journals will every quickly become a thing of the past." While it is doubtful that traditional conferences and print journals will ever become a thing of the past, I nevertheless agree that recent technological advancements are certainly going to shape and change how philosophers do business. But how?
I thought it might be nice to see what the readers of this blog think about these issues. How can philosophers further utilize the benefits of this brave new world of cyber-philosophy–where suddenly more people have access to and interest in philosophy? In what ways has technology changed the way you teach and conduct research? Finally, how can we use the wide variety of on-line formats to further increase public interest in philosophy while at the same time doing a better job of making philosophy relevant to our daily affairs? I am especially interested in hearing from people who teach on-line courses. What sorts of ideas have you come up with to improve the on-line classroom?
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