When do we ever see people arguing in American society? Sure, on scripted television, when the argument is about Police Procedure or How to Get Off The Island, tensions flare. And on C-Span the people who call in have been known to bring It sometimes, but it’s not the norm.

Forums are good ways to publish a lot of specific information with some room for difficult to follow dialgue, but they will never be able to focus on the argument itself. Chat rooms off the opportunity to dialogue, but are only effective for argument if both sides can remain concise and polite.

In person, what a mess. You’ve got to be concerned with body language, which doesn’t effect the reason of any argument whatsoever. Then everybody knows who you are so you’ve either got to make it unclear whether or not you actually support your proposition and your personal identity comes into play, neither of which aspects further the cause of actually determining if a proposition is true or false.

On television, all of these issues are multiplied, shrunken and manipulated to accomplish any convenient goal other than to reach a conclusion. False balance, verbal abuse, constant talk of strategy, red herring-ology, and theme hopping new shows are not going to get anybody closer to a firm grasp on reality.

Besides, why are so many people watching someone talk about their ideas when they could be expressing their own ideas themselves?

In light of these, and many observations found in the book, “Foundations for an Internet Mediated Argument Network” written by some nobody in 2003, we are designing an internet solution to the problem.

Spacedebate (see link on right) is the work of another group committed to designing an improvement to contemporary argument design.

Our goal is to design a module for the content management system, Drupal, which will coordinate email arguments between parties, publish them, and archive them for global search.

Wish us luck.