The 3NR

The starting premise of this thought experiment is that technology should adapt to people.

Debaters have quite well adapted various technological advances to be used for debate purposes, but this has also changed the nature of what we refer to when we think of debate. Someone not involved in a debate might conceptualize of it as it might have had looked like when it first began, but before it started internal adaptations to technology. The thoughts that come to mind when most of us think about debate (and the things that stand out to outsiders that have observed us for a bit) are probably cutting lots of cards, organizing files, carrying around tubs, then assembling all those blocks and card into a speech.

Much of the time we spend in debate involves copying paragraphs from a book or webpage, writing a sentence summary of it in order to have that sentence qualify as something like a single brick from which files are created, using a document map to build a table of contents. “Cards” were invented because it wasn’t practical for debaters to carry books around to quote from in support of their arguments; note cards were used. These cards were essentially in the same format of authoritative snippets and personal summaries that we use today. Having these types of “cards” to back arguments became a norm, a computers only furthered this need for more cards. The need was created by a lack of fast access to authoritative texts during spoken speeches, but because we continued to use that same formatting norm, faster access via information digitization only furthered that need to reduce information into files and tubs ready at our reserve.

Picture what academic competitive debate might look like it if began for the first time today, and there was new technology written specifically to adapt to the needs that these debaters would have as a result of being debaters. If you think of how the mind works, your thoughts aren’t organized top-down (like a Word document where you have to scroll down) but through relative connections. So the new debater (if debate began today) might hear or make an argument and then connect that to five related responses in his mind. Debate would start off a simply listening to opposing arguments, and needing to make mental associations to offer the best responses. If you take that last sentence as the primary need that a person choosing to do debate has, then the question is: in what ways should technology adapt to meet this need, without creating extrinsic demands and dependencies.

For a start, I think evidence might be mapped out like a web diagram – the argument to respond to in the center circle, with associated argument responses in their own circles in a secondary ring, and arguments associated with those further down. So what might evidence research look like? Creating files made sense before computers since files resembled a book, but with computers we’ve continued to use that same organization format for organizing cards into files. We’ve grown much more dependant on these files with computers and the internet. The debate process has become split between the debating that goes on in a speech and the file creation stage.

Here’s what it might look like if technology available today was repurposed and adapted to the needs that debaters would have solely as a function of being debaters (not as a function of inheriting the needs created by the limits of former technology.) When using the internet to do research in either digitized books or articles, you’d highlight text right on the webpage. You would “tag” what you have highlighted not through a sentence summary but through keywords. These keywords function like chains that would form the backbone of something I’ll refer to as an argument root. From this root, today’s equivalent of files would “grow” by having more associated snippets tagged on to it. The technology would store the entirety of the source document as well as your highlighting of it to your computer or a central team server. You would also add analytical arguments to this root; they would be chained by their keywords to references to other sources.

Today, files are walled-in and separate from other files. Think of what a politics file looks like today. We’d generally expect to find a 1NC, then a uniqueness section, links, internal link extensions and so on, organized from the top going down; we’d flip through all the pages to find the relevant new uniqueness cards, then go to our tubs to pull out a theory file to answer a theory indict of politics, get something from the internal links file, find an impact card for add-on and so on. While this was the best we could make of available technology at one point, it is clearly not how our minds conceptualize arguments – answers to politics theory should obviously be tagged with both theory and politics.

These roots would be very easy to merge with prior research you or someone else has done because the snippets are associated by their content, keywords, and the tags you have added. Right now, document files are static since you need to reorganize and rewrite them to update with new content or reference other files. A dynamic model of organization would work like the mind, which makes mental associations across the spectrum of available knowledge. The research a team does throughout the year might be referred to as their argument garden. (The names might sound odd, but think about why we call it storing cards in tubs.) Some schools would choose to keep these gardens closed to only their debaters, but there’d probably be at least a few that everyone could contribute to.

There would be a very important ancillary benefit to a public, or “open” garden. Information on the internet is organized pretty poorly now – pages related to a given webpage can only be found through a search engine, not through “browsing” or “surfing” the web more into that area (hyperlinks are the start of a solution, but obviously the author chooses which links to include and they do not update as new sources are found.) Debaters could perform an important service by organizing that information a) based on logical associations and b) based on article or webpage snippets as opposed to linking to the entire document. Knowledge would be organized by argument or idea instead of by webpage. After the season, some schools might chose to open their gardens by merging it with the public one. Whatever the debate topic was – there would be a great resource to anyone interested in developing their personal stance on it. It would resemble Wikipedia in some ways, but would have a much greater variety or arguments associated for and against that viewpoint. Wikipedia tries for a neutral point of view, whereas an open debate garden could provide all points of view so that people can understand the most popular and most “round winning” arguments against their personal beliefs. I think many people today have lost faith in the existence unbiased media sources or the authority of field experts; the neutral stance is only possible through presenting every ideology available. Today, when most people are provided an opposing point of view they’re usually only given a reductionist strawperson argument; this service would provide an easy way to view what’s actually the best and most reasoned argument for the other side so that people have a chance to understand what those opposed to them truly believe, in their own unfiltered words.

Returning to how a debate round might look like, debaters would likely “flow” the speech of their opponent by entering the keywords of that argument as the center bubble in the argument web. From that, the most relevant associations from the root you’ve assembled in your reading on the topic will pop-up and you can pick and drop analytics and “cards” you find relevant to form your own speech. These wouldn’t really be cards in the format we use today. They would not be taken or “cut” from their original source in any way. The root could also change dynamically as the source on the internet might be updated. This way, you could browse the source your opponent used, and maybe make a contextual indict of that. This note would be tagged on to that article so that everyone using the same garden as you would instantly have that indict visible as well. Your research would be “cutting for” every part of the topic at once, since you wouldn’t be researching files with a narrow topic but reading good articles overall and tagging paragraphs and sentences that might be relevant to this or that in the future. Much like online social bookmaking, multiple users could tag part of an article and you might be suggested the most popular tags or related article snippets. You could browse forward to what others have suggested you read and tag on that topic, as well as generally popular articles in that area. This system would enable you to research many, many times fasters than in today’s system, and you would be able to find relevant snippets in online articles for responses immediately after hearing their argument; no longer would research and argumentation phases be split.

This system would be designed to aid you in organizing your response; and it would also reward closer listening to their argument. The closer you listen, the more specific the response snippets can be – you might have less of the paragraph highlighted if their argument was a shortened version, for example. Debate rounds would look like the concept of debate was imagined in the original sense, and the technology would work only in the background to assist you in the argumentation and response, but without creating new needs to be met and without changing the way you approach listening and responding. You wouldn’t listen to a speech as “frontlines” or “offcase” but as keywords of the main argument their source is making. The strategism of debate has compartamentalized arguments into positions, so the focus now is more on refuting the position as a whole as opposed to the specific nuances of the argument. This is in part because the files are static and organized into responses before the round and before listening to the different arguments of that position. If a team emphasizes more on a particular argumentative point of a position, with the new system that would represent a larger argument bubble and have more response snippets and more highlighted versions of snippets of that webpage (since the entirety of the source is stored locally) associated to it.

Obviously all this would be done on a computer, but there’d be just the one window open where you are flowing – and at the same time, you are picking the best out of what’s displayed as a likely response. The responses you find or make on the spot would be added to your root, and the ones that you extend, go for, or win on would be given more chance of showing up again. This mimics how if you win on an argument, you’re more likely to repeat it. In essence, all the gathered snippets of knowledge from web pages, databases, articles and books would be stored right behind your flow and show up when needed – this imitates the way the mind stores all the knowledge you’ve amassed on a topic and makes mental associations when you hear a related argument. This close parallelism means the needs created by citing authoritative sources to support your argument is less likely to create additional needs, norms, or practices that for policy debaters get in the way or alter the idea of debate as thought of by most people. This concept would also have the ancillary benefit of creating a more logically-fluent storage and browsing model for information, and maybe influencing future generations to make other things – like internet websites, newspapers, and books – less separated into different files, or “walled-in,” and instead more dynamically oriented.