Which is one reason, perhaps, why letters pages remain (mostly) a politer discourse than threads on blogs, where abuse and churlish contempt for other people's views can hide behind anonymity.
But for people trying to carry on serious constructive work with ideas, threaded discourse technology is a source of continual frustration.
Like setting messages afloat in bottles, threaded discourse has the virtue of preserving ideas and getting them out into the world, but is not a good way of getting them to a desired destination or for maintaining a productive exchange.
Only a few days before the Arizona shootings, internet thinker Clay Shirky had a piece published in the Harvard Business Review that talked about the problems of uncivil discourse in the comment threads on websites.
Photo by Jesse Untracht-Oakner, courtesy of Rhizome.
The findings don't square with our current reality, where a meme of a president, elevated by message and image boards, has turned our entire political discourse into a comment thread.
Uyttendaele's sentiment echoes that of Calvino's Polo, who says, "Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else".
As a counterpoint, he also cites Italo Calvino's Marco Polo, who in that enchanting book Invisible Cities tells Kublai Khan: "Cities, like dreams, are made of desire and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else".
The theme of this year's festival was The Invisible City, after Italo Calvino's 1972 novel Invisible Cities, in which he wrote that cities, "like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else".
The issue of an ethnic identity unconnected to the Asian mainland has become one thread in the discourse regarding the political status of Taiwan.
