apologia
June 2007

The web is not quite the democratic space it was expected to become; there is too much noise on it today, and a new e–zine must justify itself. Phalanx is intended as a platform for debate, and it presumes there will be interested readers and writers without its having to make itself heard above the tumult. It will not induce people to join its debates because there is too much inducement on the web, the general commotion being attributable to a throng of voices. Moreover, those joining debates need to have been persuaded about the importance of argument. Phalanx offers itself as a platform for reasoned debate and hopes that it will fulfill, if only in a small way, the democratic promise of the web.

Phalanx as a Refereed Journal

August 2013

When Phalanx got going there was no intention on the part of its founders to make it a refereed journal largely for academics. It was intended to initiate argument and debate in the public space, a process in which anyone might join in. Phalanx attempted to make use of the democratic potential of the web to initiate debate and there is a strange paradox here because it is the web’s ‘democratic potential’ which makes it patently unsuitable for debate. By and large, debate on any subject, at one time, was initiated by ‘informed opinion’. A debate would be carried out through magazines and journals, which had to attain distinction themselves by addressing an ‘elite’ of some kind and gaining acceptance. At some point in history, the ability to persuade through reason was replaced by the capacity to market, fame by publicity and the provocation by the quest for endorsements. The web, today, seems to have begun the dissolution of ‘informed opinion’ because few people who read are called upon to do more than ‘like’ what they read or see. This being the case it seems necessary for Phalanx to retreat into ‘pre-democratic’ modes which, hopefully, still exist in the academia. The academia may remain the one place in which one would still need to demonstrate that one’s opinions are actually ‘informed’. While Phalanx is a refereed journal it is hardly intended only for academics. It is aware of the compulsions in the academia and emphasizes that debate and speculation are still its primary aims. The imaginativeness of the arguments, their plausibility and their interest (to an ideal public) is of more importance than the empirical evidence summoned to support them. Perhaps too much academic work is devoted to incremental ideas and Phalanx hopes to be more than incremental. Since ‘imaginative’ speculation is becoming impossible in the hard sciences, Phalanx expects to turn more towards the humanities and social sciences.

(ISSN No. 2320 –7698 assigned to Phalanx on 12th March 2013)

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