Sociologists and Openness

     So the other day in my Sociological Theory class, we began to talk about a man named Jurgen Habermas. Habermas was a proponent of Critical Theory, which I won't explain here because it would take too long, and you would all fall asleep. However, to give a brief background, Habermas thought that society could, should, and would develop and progress to some eventual stage of universal rationality, or universal truth or understanding. However, it was possible to hinder, delay, or even stop that process, if humanity fell too much under the sway of things like power or influence, basically anything that would unduly influence a person and prevent them from acting as they naturally would. In his opinion, today's world has fallen a bit too far under the influence of things like the power of the state or government, the power of the media and the "consumer society" that we sometimes hear about, and the power of the all-important economy which seems to have a will of it's own, and an obsession with making and having money. In his opinion, these things have taken far too much influence in our individual lives, affecting and controlling everything we do, and are preventing us from being who we naturally should.

 Jurgen Habermas (nice hair, dude)

    There are other theorists and theories which say different things,    but we can certainly see some truth in what Habermas says. It's also interesting to think about what he says because he's actually the first theorist that we've studied who's actually still alive. : p Since his ideas were written in and about and for our times, they're a bit more pertinent than most of the theories we've studied.

  Anyways, I did find one very interesting connection between his theories and what we've been talking about in our digital civilization class. Habermas talks about how in order for humanity to be able to freely and naturally progress towards the eventual goal of universal truth, certain conditions have to be met. One of these conditions was that humanity be given an "Ideal Speech Situation", a situation in which any and all  individuals who care to are able to come together to discuss a problem or question and collaboratively come up with a solution or answer. What makes it ideal is that the individuals would be free from outside influences, such as manipulation from outside parties, ulterior motives, etc. Basically, everyone who is participating is doing so solely out of a genuine interest to find a solution to the problem, and doesn't care if it's their particular idea or insight that solves the problem or if it's someone else's, so long as the problem is solved.  In an ideal speech situation, a solution is decided upon through what we call the force of the better argument, or that we pick a solution because it's the best, and not for any other reason, like who came up with it, etc.

  As I was thinking about this, I realized that while this is highly difficult to do in our modern world, there is a phenomenon in the world that matches this concept:  Open Source.  I imagine that open source isn't flawless, but it does seem to match up pretty well with this ideal speech situation. In an open source environment, anyone is permitted to participate and contribute to the project or software or whatever it is, and is more or less free from outside influences, like politics or money or power. People participate in the project just because they have a desire or interest in seeing it come together and work as well as possible. These things may or may not be true, but we'll say they are for the sake of argument. Also, since everyone's ideas and potential solutions are scrutinized and argued over by everyone else, only the best ones will rise to the top and win out. Thus, it's a system based on merit (or the force of the better argument) and nothing else (ideally, anyways).
   It was pretty cool to be able to draw this parallel between this class and my other class. I think that it's awesome when your classes overlap like this, because it helps you see how the stuff we're learning actually does apply to other things in the world.