I looked through your blog. Interesting stuff
In my experience, when you submerse yourself into the online world and communicate at the speed of technology, it’s a given large chunks of it are missing. I’ve noticed this in virtual social arenas where people meet, fall in online love, get online married, and then get online divorced in a matter of a week. It’s all abbreviated.

I dropped out of the virtual world for a maybe a few weeks once, and when I returned, the entire community I knew had changed and swapped around. Of course to them, I had been gone eons.

I’ve heard people that are serious about their Twitter just feel like the world has gone on without them if a day goes by and they haven’t connected.

It’d be an interesting thing to see how this effects relationships in the long run, comparing them to people that socialize the old-fashioned way.

Kalin Tyler

What the post doesn’t address is the fundamental of what it means to debate, and why you would want to debate anyway. Fundamentally, the concept behind a debate is that there are some questions which are unanswerable, and that the “winner” is the person who is better at debating. In life, however, it does not work that way.

If you are trying to resolve a problem, which is usually what you are trying to do in life, the “winner” is the person who can best understand and resolve the other person’s problem.

When discussing the security of cloud computing versus legacy approaches, there are too many questions to “win” a debate. The only way to win is to understand the problem to resolve, the potential risks involved, and the importance of each risk to the person for whom you are resolving the problem.

Today, I think most “debates” end with the answer “it depends”, for precisely that reason. Rather than thinking in terms of debate, it’s useful to think in terms of discussions or conversations, which, indeed, are quite difficult to conduct in 140 characters.

I knew someone would bring up other forums from the dark ages, like BBS. The difference is the pervasiveness of the new social media forums. I can guarantee CNN never ran a running BBS feed, nor did Tom Waits, Paris Hilton, and Stan Lee even know what a BBS was, but twitter is different in that it is so pervasively used that it is easy for it to be used as a substitute for alternative methods of communication.

The other issue is that as these new formats grow and their ease of use integrates in all form factors – ever use a BBS from your iPhone? Ever tweet from you iPhone? it enables folks to not look for alternative methods of communication. Yes some will call and discuss intelligently, but I think we have all witnessed many who do not, or who misinterpret something on twitter and never pursue further except to allow the misunderstanding to linger.

@shrdlu I know =)

Alternative response:

@amrittsering: You’re a doodyhead.

I won’t be at Shmoocon, but I love the concept of the TSA debate – maybe we can find a different forum

Great post!

I, too, love *good* debate but that’s not often found on Twitter and the other social media. So, what do do?

I think we need to set up “Master Debater Meetups” at all of the cons and have James Arlen moderate debate.

Why don’t you and I face off at Shmoocon and use the topic “The TSA: Evil or Just Amazingly Inept”???

-Armorguy

Smart people know when to pick up the phone and get it solved in person/realtime instead of playing Internet reindeer games.