Debate Without Walls: Technology In Debate
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.
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