John Mark Reynolds is serializing his speech from GodBlogCon at his site. Part 1 is up.

I like the way it starts.

Having a philosopher write about blogging is either overkill or under kill. On the one hand, we are well read as a group and try to ask the hard questions. On the other hand, blogging is a new cultural phenomenon and philosophers are famously disconnected from the actual world. I was once lost in Atlanta at an American Philosophical Association meeting.

and the way it ends.

Plato, I think, offers the best attack on preserved performance. For of course books are preserved performance. In ancient times they were a new technology that allowed a different type of education from live dialoging with Socrates in the Agora. Books are on the side of preserved technology. When this paper was a conference talk, it was a live thing and now it is not whether you are reading it or listening to the pod cast version. Books worried Plato and next we will turn to his attack on them and all of preserved performance.

But you might be interested in reading the middle, too.

via Blogotional because I don’t read John Mark Reynolds every day.