Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Twitter

  • Our Own Naked Sun

    By Daniel A. Kaufman ___ In The Naked Sun (1957), Isaac Asimov imagines Solaria, a low-population world in which residents live on estates so large that one never encounters one’s neighbors in person. As robots are employed in virtually all manner of labor, the only human inhabitants of these estates are their owners. This contrasts…

  • To Share or Not to Share (On Social Media)

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ There is a joy to not sharing one’s thoughts with others. This is an unexpected benefit I stumbled onto when I recently all but gave up social media. A story might illustrate. I made the decision in very late 2021 to radically restrict my social media use. [1] Around two weeks…

  • The (Im)Possibility of Discussion on Social Media

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ Sheena Mason (SUNY Oneonta) and Kevin Currie-Knight dialogue about the perils and promises of discussion on social media. (Sheena is more optimistic about the potential than Kevin is.) Along the way, they talk about perspectives on truth and whether humans are capable of getting it in an objective way, the postmodern-y…

  • Academic Freedom In the Age of Social Media

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ David Labaree (Professor Emeritus, Stanford University) and I talk about the history and meaning of academic freedom. We discuss whether there ever has been a “golden age” where academics were safe to be heterodox (no), and what academic freedom means in an age of social media and the in-group policing it…

  • Evolution, belief, and manipulation: A discussion with Hugo Mercier

    by Robert Gressis ____ In this dialogue, Hugo Mercier (French National Center for Scientific Research, Not Born Yesterday) and I discuss how human belief and manipulation work, and Hugo’s research about why people aren’t as manipulable as we sometimes think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NcMWlU6jzA&list=PLFBaXJ7yNOYERObvjSkJfoDOgtMWVhWse&index=2&ab_channel=ElectricAgora 01:24​ Hugo’s thesis: When it comes to communication, people are not easily manipulated, but…

  • Talking and Not Talking in the Age of Social Media

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ Not everything you want to say is worth saying, especially to large audiences. To see this, imagine that the year is 1982. A football assistant coach doesn’t know it yet, but he will be fired from his job for making ill-advised political comments. After the team’s recent game, this fictitious coach…

  • New Year Musings

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ 2020 will be remembered in the US for three things: the Covid-19 pandemic; racial unrest, rioting, looting, and vandalism across a number of American cities; and the defeat of Donald Trump by Joe Biden in the US presidential race. Beyond their qualities as spectacle, notable enough in their own right,…

  • Peak Woke Philosophy

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ After bearing witness to the train wreck that was the “White Paper on Publication Ethics,” I was convinced that woke philosophy couldn’t possibly get any worse.  I was wrong, of course, and in hindsight, it was foolish of me even to have imagined such a thing.  After all, I had…

  • Adolescent Politics

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ The sub-heading of the late-Christopher Hitchens’ book, God is Not Great, reads: “how religion poisons everything.”  Now, maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t.  I really don’t know.  But one thing I do know is this: Politics poisons everything. And the reason it does is that we are not serious…

  • Trump, Twitter and the Norms of Political Communication

    by Daniel Tippens On September 23rd 1952, Richard Nixon, after being accused of misusing money in his political expense fund, delivered his famous “Checkers” speech directly to the American people by, for the first time in history, purchasing a 30 minute slot of prime time television. 60 million people watched as Nixon explained all of…