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About Habermas
I've done my first period of reading about Habermas' theory of communicative action. Now it's time to summarize what I've learned so far.
The focus of my reading was to the ideas of Habermas about the ideal speech situation. His theory builds upon the idea that achieving knowledge is rooted in a subject-subject relationship, that is the relationship between people, instead of the description of rationality in terms of the subject-object relationship. Habermas explains: "The focus of investigation thereby shifts from cognitive-instrumental rationality to communicative rationality. And what is paradigmatic for the latter is not the relation of a solitary subject to something in the objective world that can be represented and manipulated, but the intersubjective relation that speaking and acting subjects take up when they come to an understanding with one another about something."(Habermas, Theory of communicative action I: 392).
The relationship between subjects is maintained through action. Habermas makes a distinction between three forms of action: instrumental action (oriented to succes, nonsocial), strategic action (oriented to succes, social) and communicative action (oriented to reaching understanding, social). Communicative action is the type of action in which people try to reach an agreement of 'true' knowledge. True is placed between brackets, because knowledge is contextual (different in time, place etc.). A discussion that evolves about certain things (e.g. about the ethics concerning blogging) is called a discourse. There are four levels in a discourse, which I will not explain further, but are relevant for the step towards formulating the ideal speech situation. According to Habermas free flow between the four levels of discourse is only possible when there is a communicative symmetry between the participants of the discourse. The conditions for this communicative symmetry together is what is called the ideal speech situation. These conditions are:
- all people involved must have equal opportunity to start a discourse;
- all people involved must have equal oppurtunity to participate in a discourse;
- there may not be any difference in power between the participants;
- the participants must be truthful to eachother.
All these conditions are meant to contribute to the exchange of true argumentation, that is that all arguments must be regarded before there can be a consensus between the participants of a discourse. That doesn't mean there will always be a consensus after participating in a discourse, one can agree to a dissensus as much to a consensus. When a consensus is achieved this doesn't mean that it's a definitive consensus. It can always be re-discussed in future time.
So far Habermas' theory. What can I say about weblogs regarding this theory? The question I have in mind at the moment is in what way the communicationtechnology weblog can contribute to achieving the ideal speech situation. To answer this question I will have to make clear that blogging is indeed a form of communicative action (a form of dialogue/conversation), which in my opinion is obvious, but there are still technological pessimists that believe computermediated contact can't be real communication.
Then there is the problem of technology involved. The things I've read about Habermas do not consider the question of the proper way of having a discourse. By that I mean whether true discourse can only take place through face-to-face contact or whether it is allowed to discuss through any media (e.g. scientific publication, telephone, e-mail etc.). My idea is that the more people can join a discourse worldwide, the more relevant arguments will be brought up and therefore any internetplatform is the most ideal situation (even though not the whole world is connected yet). Another problem forthcoming in the use of technology is the problem of trustworthiness of the people that communicate via the internet. How can you be sure that I'm a student of the Twente University? How do you know my name really is Elmine and that the picture published in my weblog is really a picture of me? For me a blog is more trustworthy than any other website, because bloggers to their best to be transparant about themselves. But maybe other people have a different opinion about that.
Finally, I will have to analyse the communicational culture between bloggers (and nonbloggers?). Are there differences in power between bloggers? And is the exchange of arguments on any topic between bloggers thruthful? These questions could be answered from the standpoint of the technology itself, that is in what way the technology used in blogging contributes to free flow of arguments between the participants. Those questions can also be analysed through the content of blogs, that is whether bloggers do argue truthful to try to achieve consensus. I'm not sure which point-of-view I would adopt for my masterthesis, maybe both.
Tomorow I will discuss the aspects mentioned above with my supervisor. Maybe he comes up with totally other questions. We will see.
Bringing back the passion
Last december Lilia commented on my posting Underrated profession. She wrote that the most important thing for her was to follow her passion. That's something I thought about in the last few weeks. I think it's time to bring back the passion in the field of communication. And therefore I'll try to make a start with declaring my passion for communication. Not only my passion for using the expressional ways of communication (the use of (verbal or non-verbal) language), but also my passion for thinking about this thing. The more I learn about communication, the less I'm able to describe to other people what it's all about, because it's about everything in our day-to-day environment. Isn't that exciting?
Is social software bad for the Dean Campaign?
This essay by Clay Shirky in Many-to-Many is interesting to read. He makes an argument why the results for Howard Dean at the election in Iowa were disappointing.
Reading recess
Recently I got mail from Thiago Tonelli Bartolome, a Brazilian living in Kiel (Germany) doing a master in Multimedia production. He hasn't started a blog yet but he's planning to do so. Looking forward to that. He tipped me not to wait too long between postings, otherwise people would stop looking at my blog. Unfortunately that's true, but I've noticed I haven't got the blogging in my day to day routine. Time for some changemanagement in my dayschedule. On top of that I've been reading lots of introductions to Habermas' theory of communicative action, and I've only started this week writing up some of the interesting parts I can use for my thesis. That sort of explains why I haven't blogged in the last month. I'll try to give more frequent updates in the future.
