Posts Tagged ‘civility’
Some communication principles for an e-salon
There are going to be a thousand diverse ways to run a worthwhile blog on a controversial topic. As long as the blog community is willing to try things out, reflect on their experiences and then enforce their own standards through modeling and (civil) correction, I think they’re likely to come up a with their own workable practices.

Judith Curry in 1688?
Still, it’s not like the online world is completely separate from the world of face-to-face communication, and the blogosphere can draw from communication skills already well-developed and understood in “meat-space” contexts. I’ve done a series of posts, for example, on how debate can work online (here and here).
Similarly, in a very interesting post, Judith Curry has identified her objective on her own blog as translating an old communication activity into a new setting:
I am striving for something different, sort of an e-salon where we discuss interesting topics at the knowledge frontier.
Three hundred plus years ago, another prominent woman wrote extensively about salon communication; let’s see what we can learn from her.
Morano Analysis #1: Civility
Let’s start by examining how the two debaters interact with each other–how they address each other and how they characterize each other’s speech. The moral of the story: Morano, and not Maslin, manages to maintain the appearance of civility necessary for a debate.