"First you have the ideas, and then you find a place to express them." Maybe, but I doubt it. Compare: "first you invent something, and then you find a part of some civilization to which it might be of use." I am sure that happens, but I doubt that happens very often.
The usual pattern is that we craft our ideas for the available means of expression, the available audience. If I am limited to academic articles, I will have ideas in academic article shape. If I have more informal outlets, I will have informal ideas. If someone listens to my half-baked stuff, I will produce half-baked stuff. If Aunt Mary likes funny cat stories, I will be on the lookout for funny behavior in cats.
When one starts a new journal, or makes blogs an option for a university community, or provides a new conversational forum, or -- perhaps most radical of all -- licenses a new conversational style, one transforms the intellectual scene - the broad possibilities for speech. (Think of what Henry James, Martha Nussbaum, John Wisdom made possible.) Also, if one closes down some option, one makes a certain kind of speech less likely to survive. (We have lost, I think, the medieval disputation, the climate that produced the Summa. We are perhaps on the way to losing some styles of anti-Semitic discourse.)
It's one of those paradox thingees: speech begins with listening, and listening begins with speech.
Posted by shea0017 at November 27, 2004 9:59 AM