Thinking Politically.

"If I had engaged in politics, I should have perished long ago and done no good to either you or to myself." - Socrates, Plato's Apology 31d-e

And yet.

I'm sure that somebody somewhere is thinking deeply about what it means to be a private citizen in a globally-connected environment. Has the meaning of the term changed since Socrates' day? Of course. In what ways? What degree of privacy is our cultural baseline, when anyone with a Twitter account and a few well-turned phrases can be a Cleon or an Alcibiades or a Cicero, instantly swaying public opinion and even policy? When applying the lever of social media to traditional actions like protests instantly magnifies a thousandfold the import of a private symbolic statement? Is the distinction between 'private citizen' and 'public figure' as clear as once it was? Do one's own private choices carry a more magnified resonance now than they used to? Does this carry an increased moral responsibility to weigh the potential consequences?

A great many conversations in which I participate these days acknowledge a certain subset of starting-points (depending upon the interlocutors' focus and interests) taken from the basket below:

• American higher education, as a system, is increasingly failing its core purpose: to educate.
• American higher education is increasingly unjust - inequality of access, adjunctification, debt, etc.
• Network technologies [already have/can/might/will] radically change something essential about current and future generations - their expectations, their methods of learning, etc.
• Used wisely, network technologies [already have/can/might/will] vastly improve American higher education.
• Used wisely, network technologies [already have/can/might/will] prepare students for fully informed and capable citizenship in an increasingly tech-reliant civilization.
• Done thoughtlessly or naively, introducing network technologies to American higher education is a dangerous entry-point for corporate and/or political interests to increase their influence/control over the system.
• Introducing network technologies to American higher education is a way for policy activists to appear to be fixing education, while actually setting the parameters for the weakening of the public system, in favor of a privatized vision of education.

As a philosopher, I got to thinking about Socrates' well-known quotation when I realized recently that I am starting to make choices, and take actions, which don't trace a clear path through the issues in these conversations about educational technology and public policy. I'm used to treating conceptual clarity and consistency as realizable goals (huzzah for my training in logic and analytic philosophy generally!); to realize that the very magnitude of complexity of this system precludes such purity of analysis, and necessarily entails conceptual compromise, is a hard thing to accept.

I wonder if I'm simply being lazy - it may be perfectly possible (if difficult) to maintain the complete clarity of one's principles in practice. On the other hand, there may be wisdom in Barney Frank's words, and what I'm experiencing may be the recognition that I'd rather not "luxuriate in the purity of [my] irrelevance" ...

No answers here, just muddy questions.