Habermas as Blogging Philosophy

Audio FAQ

It is hard to match the socializing and harmonizing potential of sharing a meal with someone. What is there about the clink of silverware and dishes that stimulates conversation and a little problem-solving. Are blog sites just a weak substitute for good mealtime conversation? Unless videoconference pricing drop off a cliff, it is hard to imagine replacing blog sites any time soon with doing a videoconference lunch with multiple points around the globe. Now there's something to look forward to. A meal seems such a perfect image for communicative action theory. Given global social customs, one could conjecture that brains and stomachs take particular pleasure in doing their digesting together.

Habermas's Communicative Action Theory (1984) provides a deeper perspective from which to examine the nova-like explosion of blogging. Who would have known there was such an additional pent-up life-force needing further social discourse? What was so limiting about phones, email, newsgroups, listservs, chat and web pages that blogs exploded across the web's social universe with such force? Considering the virtues of a blog site, one must surmise that the needed harmonizing of ideas in the public sphere was not public enough in email, not interactive enough in web pages and not a stable or a clear enough narrative in newsgroups, email lists and chat.

For an introduction to Habermas, try Deflem's less dense treatise.

Deflem, Mathieu. 1996. “Introduction: Law in Habermas’s Theory of
Communicative Action.” Pp. 1-20 in Habermas, Modernity and Law, edited by
Mathieu Deflem. London: Sage. Available June 9, 2005 at http://www.cas.sc.edu/socy/faculty/deflem/zhablaw.htm

Even more digestible translations of Habermas would be of interest.