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 The concept of "truth" as something dependent upon facts largelyoutside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophyhitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When thischeck upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the roadtowards a certain kind of madness--the intoxication of power whichinvaded philosophy with Fichte, and to which modern men, whetherphilosophers or not, are prone. I am persuaded that this intoxication isthe greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which,however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster.Bertrand Russel The history of Western Philosophy, p 737
Pragmatism and the Dawn of Internet Research Practices
 To quote a negation too ones beliefs is probably not the most common way of starting an essay, but it seems reasonably since negations says at least as much asaffirmative expressions.I have read quite a lot about 'pragmatism'from time to time but never really gethocked because these tiny little words have a tendency to grow into giganticcreatures using up all fresh air in their surroundings. As an academic, I was borninto the academic practice of criticism as some kind of purpose of its own. The 21thcentury critic is modeled on the ghost of Socrates, an ethereal machine of infinitewisdom without a real location besides the counter argument itself. Socrates interms of knowledge locations is more or less persona non grata, but his dialecticalpractice is the toolbox inherited by 21th century deconstructive practices. The idea,and practice, of deconstruction has lead to the shipwreck of modernism as idea,while modernism as practice has developed into a case of a prematurely failedutopist science fiction narrative. Deconstruction is like a sandbox of kids which hastested every possibility imaginable of all toys their parents could afford and finallyhave come to the instinctive conclusion that nothing really works in the long run.Nothing really works in the sense of making the life in the sanbox whorth while.What is pragmatism? Can we use the word 'theory' in this context? Whatever viewwe have about the word 'theory' and its place in knowledge production, I do notthink we should view it as a theory. The best way of contextualize pragmatism isprobably to call it a methodology. Pragmatism is a mediator between world viewsand knowledge practices. Its place in the production of knowledge is non-representative. A pragmatist view does not regard knowledge as representations of the world, but rather as practices we endorse to cope with the world. The Background of this essay is as follows. On a seminar about methodology wedecided to read Richard Rorty's article Method, Social Science and Social Hope.Rorty was not unfamiliar to me by any means but I had not really thought muchabout his texts since he passed away in June 8, 2007. This essay started to form in
 
the middle of April 2009. My intention is to have it finished in time for the 2 yearanniversary of Rorty's death, as a joined tribute and recontextualisation of some of this ideas. This essay is also a joined effort of my experiences as a writer in the fieldof academic technoscience and the practices as a university librarian with web lifeas some kind of specialty. The essay title Rorty On the Web therefore connotesseveral treads relating to Rorty and the World Wide Web, all threads imploded in theseemingly simple, but very complexly located question Where is Rickard Rorty Onthe Web? Some of the questions found in the location are actually simple, but mostof them are complex in the meaning: there are no way to tell for sure, onlyspeculations and conversations will get us something worthy to be proud of. If someone asked me to choose my epistemic parents and they had to be in the samegeneration as my real parents, there is a big chance I would have said Richard Rortyand Donna Haraway - building on the troublesome metaphor of the nuclear family.As I read Richard Rorty, one of his main points is that the culture of academic writingstill is very much a product of the fight between Athens and Sparta, between Indiansand Whites. We are a culture who still admire the Chinese wall as a symbol forhuman accomplishment, rather than what it actually is... A symbol of humanity in itsvery lowest forms: war, slavery and an inability to value life. We can walk on the walland breath the fresh air of human accomplishment, without even a thought of thepractices embedded in the ground we stand on. The (Great) Wall of China is also arevealing symbol of the bulk of academic discourse.CriticizingAcceptingEmbracingInstead, one could use creativity as a main relation, reading texts to find material forxxx viewpoinds, ideas.Starting in a light way, I went to the most hyped social service on the Web as of spring 2009, Twitter. If you have managed to keep your ears away from the socialhope as represented by ideological concepts as Web 2.0 and more widely used thesocial web, you might not be that familiar with Twitter. Twitter is like a giganticbranch on a gigantic tree, packed with simultaneously twittering birds. I am one of these birds and it is a big chance you are one too, but there is a very slim chance wehave picked up each other's tweets. According to Wikipedia, Twitter had 5-6 millionusers in November 2008
1
. It is like Twitter fought against Denmark of being thesecond largest nation in Scandinavia. This metaphor is meant to give anunderstanding in both directions. In some sense, the Twitter population is very big,and in another sense it is not that big really. The overwhelming majority of humanshave never even heard of Twitter or would be able to understand the beauty of thisgigantic branch of twittering birds from all nations across the world. If this essay willhave some space to grow in, and you read it in a few years from now, Twitter as anactual practice will probably be history, but you will most certainly understand what
 
I am talking about since I am quite confident that the social web developed duringthe first decade of the 21th millennia will have some evolutionary properties. WhenRorty writes about social hope, he does certainly not mean something in line withthe discourse about web 2.0, flourishing between 2004 and 2009, incorporatingwords as participation & democracy. And still, it is not completely impossible thereare some converging lines in those different spaces of understanding. But let uslisten to the twittering birds. What do they have to say about a contemporarythinker like Richard Rorty? The size of a twitter message is maximum 140 signs, so a tweet is generallycontained within a syntactical sentence. Twitter has
a particular web page
forsearching their database
2
. I simply searched for rorty in the search field. The searchengine went out and picked up the recent uses of the term 'rorty' among the 5-6million twittering birds, and presented and nice column with 15 tweets about rortyranging from a time span of one hour ago to four days ago. 15 tweets within a timespan of four days leads to the speculation that Richard Rorty might not be the mostpopular person on Twitter. As most things in human life this might just be a anomalyin something completely contradictive, but I doubt it. Finding the a rational answerto the question of Rorty's amount of popularity on Twitter would be quite easy. Icould write some algorithm to compare the instanced of the search term 'rorty' inrelation to other persons on twitter. This algorithm might for example lead to therational result that the search term 'rorty' is X % less popular than 'derrida', but X %more popular than 'haraway'. The speculative relations less and more used here areused after a quick look at the hit list after searching on these three terms separately.It is one of those informal investigations we do all the time in our daily commonsense life. It is more or less the same practice my grandmother used when sheinvented one of her fabulous cookies. I do not spend time to fill the X:es with exactfigures because the time and attention simply cost too much in relation to what I getout of it. Attention cost is one of the most used parameters in informal logic. I know Icannot search every location on the Web for information about Rorty, and therefore Ihave to gather my recourses around a few well chosen locations. I also have to do amultitude of attention choices in every location I invest in. One reason for making itquite easy to identify Rorty on the web is that he has a relatively well definednamespace.
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