Who is responsible for comments on blogs?

I just read in the Frankfurter allgemeine, that a journalist was sentenced because of a comment a visitor posted on his blog. The court in Hamburg seemingly makes no distinctions between blogs and old-school printed newspapers, which is certainly a bizarre notion: expecting that everybody that has a blog takes responsibility for everything that is said on it, limits the possibilities of the net severely. This precedent makes writing blogs by "citizen journalists" either infeasible (moderating all comments is certainly a full-time job if the blog reaches readers beyond the authors friends and family) or severely limits the functionality of blogs (the easiest solution is not to allow comments at all).

What can Schiller tell us about the world we live in?

Not many people know that apart from being a great poet, Schiller was also a very lucid thinker - one wonders what his philosophical achievements would have been had he not occupied such a marginal position in Weimar (doubtlessly because of his radical ideas), being short of resources his more fortunate colleagues (one thinks Goethe) had. He completed a remarkable tractate on aesthetics, where he attempted an analysis of his time through a modified Kantian philosophical system. The main pathology he saw was that the Sinntrieb (the sensual drive) and the Formtrieb (the formal drive) were not in harmony. The Sinntrieb makes us receptable and responsive to the world, but does not give us any control, while the Formtrieb gives us the possibility of forming abstract ideas and the world according to transcendental principles. The Formtrieb, while being a "higher" capacity, can never suspend the Sinntrieb or act against it (as Kant noted at the beginning of his critique of pure reason: all cognition starts with perception by the senses). The mediating principle for Schiller was the Spieltrieb (the play drive) which puts the other two drives in harmony so that the two pulling forces equal each other, giving the subject freedom. This play drive is expressed in aesthetics, and in aesthetic education Schiller sees the path to a truly enlightened society.

At this moment I must thank the patient reader for having bothered to make it through this very abstract introduction, and reward her by telling what brought this contemplation about. In the introduction to What is internet studies David Silver nonchalantly puts internet studies on the disciplinary pedestal. This is a very clever bluff, but it is still nonsensical, since internet studies do not have an object of study that is not already covered by disciplines proper (communication, informatics, psychology, sociology ...). Of course internet studies are a very interesting and vivid interdisciplinary field, but the pretension to disciplinarity is nonetheless preposterous. My main concern lies elsewhere, though: proposing in all earnest that a discipline can be founded upon a completely empirical object is only a symptom of radical empiricism that is permeating contemporary societies. Researchers (and those doing research on new media especially) have become all too accustomed to thinking that the mere accumulation of empirical data will somehow produce knowledge. Grounded theory then degenerates from collecting data that will inform theory to presenting the data as if it were self-explanatory.

What has this got to do with Schiller? It seems we are moving into the era of Sinntrieb domination. If philosophy was once the prime vehicle of the Formtrieb, the modern scientific subsystem of society is ever more becoming a pure manifestation of Sinntrieb. In this development humanity is progressively losing its power of agency: as noted earlier, the Sinntrieb allows us to react to the environment, but not in an autonomous manner, but rather instinctively and, what is most important, without the ability to understand the environment as malleable. The Sinntrieb is in itself completely passive. We are reduced to mere observers of a reality that - as I have noted in my post about Marx and agency - we are daily recreating ourselves. Seeking to be free from natural constraints we have locked ourselves in a steel casing (Weber's term "Stahlhartes Gehäuse" is often mistranslated as iron cage, missing the point that Gehäuse is something that at once enables and constrains) and now we are coming close to permanently throwing away the key.

The fact

When reading Gauntlett's introduction to the second edition of Web.studies, which is composed mainly of anecdotal evidence, I remembered this great episode of Dilbert, which analyses the changes "the fact" (also the title of the episode) is going through in modern society in part because of the influence of the internet:

part1

part2

part3