One of the reasons for showcasing debate on the Internet is that there are few other places where debate can take place.  Alasdair MacIntyre, a Notre Dame professor and a philosopher not unfamiliar with debate, writes:

“There is no type of institutional arena in our society in which plain persons — not academic philosophers or academic political theorists — are able to engage together in systematic reasoned debate designed to arrive at a rationally well-founded mind[...]a common mind which might then be given political expression.  Indeed the dominant forms of organization in contemporay social life militate against the coming into existence of this type of institutional arena.  And so do the dominant modes of what passes for political discourse.  We do not have the kinds of reading public necessary to sustain practically effective social thought.  What we have instead in contemporary society are a set of small-scale academic publics within each of which rational discourse is carried on, but whose discourse is of such a kind as to have no practical effect on the conduct of social life” GoogleBooks link to quotation in context

“Some Enlightenment Projects Reconsidered” in Ethics and Politics:  Selected Essays.   Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 185.

One of the reasons that we blog our arguments the way that we do is to encourage the education of such a reading public.  It’s perhaps important for contemporary society.