Jerah brought up an interesting idea in a previous post, one which I thought deserved its own subject line. Here is an excerpt from the comment:
my husband’s studying some kind of semiotics right now, and apparently there’s an essay of roland barthes’ on pro wrestling (the WWF kind) that says that france’s version of WWF is all about ethics: the “bad guy” in every fight is bad because he cheats and doesn’t play fair (strangles the guys when the ref isn’t looking, etc). and while that happens in american WWF too, the emphasis is more on politics: the bad guy is bad because he’s a communist (at the time Barthes was writing the essay), or, these days, a liberal french wuss with a poodle… 
and the good guy is an all-american hero.
all that to say, maybe blog discussions are more like pro wrestling than round-table discussions…
It is an interesting analogy. And similar to a wrestling match, you sometimes see people taking a tag team approach. Perhaps it is easier to look at blogging as a game–how can I win someone to my side–than it is to treat it as open dialogue? After all, is not web-surfing in general a form of entertainment just like television? Yet the latter is a passive pursuit, whereas blogging is an active form of entertainment (kind of like gambling). It would be interesting if someone did a psychological profile and analysis of people who blog.
I am sure that there are reasons both good and bad for why people blog. Getting back to the idea that blogging is less like a round table discussion and more like a wrestling match, there is a debate taking place over in the Chattablogs arena on Clifton’s blog. Here are some excerpts from his post titled, What Do You Mean by “Dialogue?”:
But there are two ends to which dialogue can be put, and it is helpful if we distinguish between them. The older and most basic idea is simply the communication of one’s ideas and convictions for the purpose of understanding…
…There is, however, another end toward which persons pursue dialogue, and this understanding is the operant definition in present day discourse. Here dialogue means not just communication and understanding but rather change and compromise. Here, no matter how well-stated the various positions, no matter how much clarity of understanding has been obtained, no matter how well done has been the weighing and evaluating of arguments, if the members of the dialogue haven’t changed their views, even incrementally, by the end of the exercise, then “dialogue” hasn’t really taken place.
Clifton then goes on to explain how the latter idea of dialogue is grounded in the “modern virtues of tolerance and respect.” Furthermore, he says that those who choose not to abandon their beliefs in the name of unity are not tolerable by those who uphold this new definition of dialogue. The point he eventually gets to is that this idea of unifying dialogue leads to moral relativism.
Only if all participants can give up their respective beliefs as fundamentally and incorrigibly true can participants in such a dialogue achieve any sort of unity. But then if they do that, it is not dialogue that has happened but proselytization, in this case proselytization to a single epistemological and moral premise of the relativity of all truth and knowledge claims.
Perhaps this is why blogging seems so much like pro-wrestling and less like an interactive discussion? It may just be that the participants in the dialogue have core beliefs out of which flow far different expectations on how the game should end. Unlike a wrestling match, we can expect more draws than wins in the blogosphere, regardless of how well an argument or position is laid out. It seems like in order to obtain the most benefit from the dialogue, that the contenders need to learn to play by the same set of logical rules. Without these things in their proper place, we can expect outcomes nothing short of confusion, frustration and anger.