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E-book The Face to Face Principle : Science, Trust, Democracy, and the Internet
The internet is changing the way knowledge, in the broadest sense, is made and understood. It is a change from making knowledge predominantly in small groups via face-to-face interaction to making knowledge predominantly via remote interaction. We think this change, if it is too radical, could be disastrous for the long-term future of what we call ‘pluralist democracy’, or ‘structured choice democracy’, not to mention science and the very idea of truth itself.1We would like to stop or slow this change, so it never becomes the accepted standard. This book is meant to explain what the change is, why it should be halted or reversed, and what needs to be done to stop it and its more danger-ous consequences.We started putting together the ideas and gathering the contributors to this book in the summer of 2018. We finished a first draft almost two years later in March 2020. Astonishingly, we found ourselves instantly living through a natu-ral experiment that we might have designed to illustrate the book’s thesis. The natural experiment is the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic lockdown, which resulted in a massive switch from face-to-face to remote communication.2 But it meant we had to prepare a rather different second draft which reacted to what we were seeing happening around us.
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