Philosophy

The child will play in the adder's nest

Isaiah sees a holy mountain where children blunder into adders' nests and are still safe.

At a recent workshop on the blogosphere, presenters showed how they use blogs in their teaching: inviting students to post questions and opinions, and respond to those of others, in public space. Much of the web teaching technology available (WebCT, Vista, Blackboard) exists primarily to create a private and protected space for student interchange. There was lively conversation about whether such protection was necessary; whether students take unnecessary risks by writing in public.

I think about this. The barriers to publication, and the limits to distribution of early publications, in the past, protected people in various ways -- from the full force of hostile or malicious response, and from establishing an indelible record of opinion and response that might foreclose later options. (Folks in the McCarthy era learned that professing fashionable left-wing politics in one decade could make one a pariah in the next.) As it becomes easier and easier to leave a permanent mark in the public world, and easier and easier for interested persons to track down someone's entire intellectual history, it becomes harder for people to leave their past behind or to make safe mistakes in their youth.

And we are still some distance from Isaiah's holy mountain.