Nigel Thrift is a very important researcher in geography, as well as being Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick. Here he comments on the link of blogs and SR:
For one thing that I have found really interesting about the turn to speculative realism is that is has clearly been fuelled by online communities which have turned above all to blogs as an important means of swapping material, revealing first thoughts, and making revisions. I doubt that the growth of speculative realism would have been so insistent without these communities scattered all over the world, or so rapid. Why?
He then offers five blog-related reasons for the quick SR spread. His conclusion about SR:
So did these blogs have an effect? I think that they did. In the case of speculative realism, they allowed the field to agglomerate more quickly than it otherwise would and to gain momentum faster than it otherwise would have. Get enough people to feel that they are in on something and they will want to diffuse it outwards. I think that they have also produced a field which is more heterodox than might otherwise have been the case, more willing to draw on traditions which were not avowedly philosophical: they contributed to an interdisciplinary formation which has one foot in philosophy but another in all manner of intellectual communities.
But his overall conclusion should also be of interest to us in light of the history of philosophy discussions we have had here (most recently this one on Beiser's NDPR review):
In other words, this chapter in intellectual history shows how a new variant of communication can have formative effects, and in fascinating ways. As a result of it and similar episodes in other fields, I am now quite sure that archiving the Internet is a worthwhile activity for intellectual historians of the future because, when the problem is reasonably well-specified, blogs can show communities worrying away at the issues in all but real time.
In the fine old Internet Tradition, I recommend you read the whole thing.
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