Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 226.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2024-11-05 07:09:40+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: moderation

This morning BBC Radio 4 announced a special programme on the besieged
moderators of social media sites, with the emphasis on what they have to
endure from the trash thrown at them. I am glad to be able to say that
members of Humanist have been with very few exceptions so kind and
polite that moderating discussions here has for the most part been a
consistent pleasure and honour. More intellectual argument would be
welcome, however :-).

I keep thinking of the very early days of e-mail communication among us,
when in the first blush of enthusiasms people proclaimed a new age of
enlightenment among us. Recall, for example, the hype of hypertext
promotion, then look at the legibility of online material so choked with
hyperlinks that they can barely be read for the de facto advertising.
Then I think on what conditions would be like if we were never got
carried away by our enthusiasms.

The following is from Ithiel de Sola Pool et al, "Foresight and
Hindsight: The Case of the Telephone", in de Sola Pool's valuable
collection, The Social Impact of the Telephone (1977). The authors quote
one General Carty, Chief Engineer at the American Telephone and
Telegraph Company from 1907:

> Some day we will build up a world telephone system making necessary
> to all peoples the use of a common language, or common
> understanding of languages, which will join all the people of the
> earth into one brotherhood. . . . When by the aid of science and
> philosophy and religion, man has prepared himself to receive the
> message, we can all believe there will be heard, throughout the
> earth, a great voice coming out of the ether, which will proclaim,
> "Peace on earth, good will towards men."

The authors contrast the thoroughly sober remarks of the more practical
folks who objected to flights of fancy, and those who couldn't
understand, for example, why a young employee of the U.S. Post Office,

> one who holds an honorable and far more responsible position than
> any man under the Postmaster General, should throw it up for a d--d
> old Yankee notion (a piece of wire with two Texas steer horns
> attached to the ends with an arrangement to make the concern bleat
> like a calf) called a telephone.

Here we are, with equally d--d notions that a sorting machine can write
as intelligibly as a social media user or as an academic anxious to be
published.

Comments?

Yours,
WM

--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews;  Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted
List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org
Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/
Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php