The Internet Debates

I've written a bit before about new kinds of performance made possible by the internet. And in that vein I was thinking a bit today about the future of debate. Sadly, formal debating seems to be basically irrelevant these days. Outside of political debates, which tend to be fairly heavy on rhetoric and light on substance, there isn't much of a public debate scene. And what little there is is often dominated by personality and spectacle, rather than ideas and good argument. Worse still, the closest we get to taking advantage of the enormous interactive scale of the internet is taking the same debate format and streaming the video to the internet.

My idea for doing better is called The Internet Debates. The debate has two teams and an impartial moderator. The moderator can decide the format, but let's assume four rounds of 7 minutes per team, for a total of just under an hour of content for the whole debate. In reality, the debate itself would be constructed over eight weeks because, instead of being live, each round would be a video collectively created and edited from the combined abilities of the internet. Or, at least, anyone on the internet who wants to participate.

A team's round goes in two parts: firstly, anyone who wants to submits content for the round. These will usually be short (<1min) videos making a particular point. Anyone who has submitted a video can vote on everyone else's to help rank them. In the second part, anyone can submit a candidate edit combining enough content to fill the 7 minute round. Those are also voted on by anyone who has submitted, and the end result becomes the team's video for that round.

In a sense, it's pretty similar to Kasparov v World, but World v World and tweaked to suit the format. Hopefully, much like in the Kasparov game, strong voices on each team would rise to the top and there would be a healthy discussion about how best to present the arguments. At the end, the moderator would declare a winner, but you'd also do a pre- and post-poll delta winner to figure out which team changed the most minds.

I think it would be particularly interesting watching the debate develop over the course of a few weeks. Perhaps people would be driven by feeling that the side they believe most stringly isn't being represented well, and go from watching to participating. It seems like the kind of thing you could get very invested in.