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New Kids on the Net 145

desirable effects of each participant having an equal voice and basi-
cally similar chances to contribute to a common goal can not be sep-
arated from the nightmare of computer-mediated witch hunts.
Involvement in mailing lists similarly suggests that their procedural
advantages, compared to traditional communication, can be a dubi-
ous blessing, provoking exalted expectations and impeding a sober
analysis of how the new media might affect the Humanities. I have
specified a more restricted terrain to begin to answer the question of
the Internet’s implications for philosophy. Scholarly work is, on the
one hand, fairly rigidly determined by professional standards while,
on the other hand, often characterised by a spirit of tolerance and
mutual respect. Even though both give-l and philweb shared some of
these qualities they were not their most important contributions to
the issue at hand.
By shifting the ground from the classical manipulation of texts to-
wards instantaneous textual publicity, people writing on these lists
changed some basic rules of literacy. Rather than being presented in
curricular modules, philosophy could be seen as a continuous group-
activity, permeating the week in between classes, blending local set-
tings and external interventions. Rather than following given
institutional patterns such activities could arise (and disappear) spon-
taneously, uncoerced by efficiency testing and financial constraints.
Such lists, to summarise, produce a new genre: semi-scholarly on-the-
spot writing, transmissible across the planet. I did not, in this talk,
present examples of how serious (or how annoying) electronic philo-
sophical discussion can get at close view. Suffice it to say that the list’s
archives have been indexed by the big search engines and that the log
files show considerable interest in many of the issues discussed over
the years. This is another prospect of things to come: continuous digi-
tal availability of day-to-day discourse. (I’ll not pass judgement on
whether this is a good thing or a nuisance.)
None of this will change the merits of a single philosophical ar-
gument, but it might well contribute to shifting the ground on which
traditional philosophy itself rests. General principles and universal
rules have always been prominent concerns for philosophers, even
while their means of communication were quite specific: books, pa-
pers, lectures. This discursive frame has not been seriously chal-
lenged by the advent of mass media and one-way broadcasting.
Neither the telephone nor TV has had any tangible impact on the
way philosophy is done. There is a chance that the constitution of a
permanent, communicative, electronic space and the development of
virtual philosophical communities within this space will be of