Sharing Ideas isn't Free

As part of the class assignment that I maintain this blog, I'm required to write an About Me post; and for the longest time I've been putting it off both because I wasn't sure how interesting it would be to people and because I wasn't completely sure I saw the point in it.

However, I do need to write it at some point, so that might as well be now.  In the interest of staying somewhat on topic, I'd like to try and explain why I maintain so many blogs and just what I hope to accomplish when I talk about esoteric topics like this.  I do want to maintain a focus on communication itself and what my perspective is on it, but this will be a bit more introspective than I usually write, so if you've somehow managed to build this view of me as some emotionless bastion of rationality, sorry in advance.

Now, pardon me while I act a wee bit hypocritical, because a lot of what I'm about to say is stuff I'm currently ignoring.

To start with, the biggest thing when learning from others is to abstract and objectify their actual existence as much as possible.  Learn to separate ideas from people when evaluating them, and learn to integrate ideas with people when explaining them.

For instance, imagine that you are in a large, abandoned library and you pick up a dusty book on philosophy from some author you've never heard of but that has an impressive name and you read about two chapters, or maybe more if you find out you're agreeing with him or her.

You're now in the right frame of mind to process information.  This author could be the world's leading expert on this topic, or he could be some shmuck that just wrote a book because he was bored one day.  You don't know.  And because no one else is around, and it's a lovely fall day where you have nothing to do, it doesn't matter.  Take an hour, read a little bit.  Will you get his entire opinion on the matter?  No, of course not.  He's got a bookshelf, you've read 60 pages.  Will you be well educated enough to form an opinion yet?  Assuredly not!

When you separate people from the equation, processing information becomes much simpler.  Collaboration is awesome for spreading ideas, and terrible for internalizing them.  Do not discuss your philosophies with a group because this forces you to have conclusions prematurely, and even worse, it forces you to stick to your conclusions.

Remember, every time you communicate with someone, you give them a picture of yourself that you must now live with.  The more you communicate, the less malleable you will be as a person.  It will get tougher and tougher to change your opinion, not just because of saving face, but because the expectations of what you believe will skyrocket.  Changing a public view means that not only must you explain that you've changed views, but also why, which is sometimes the more complicated question to answer.

When you don't communicate yourself with others, it's safer to experiment with your ideas, stupidity doesn't carry as high a risk, you can develop faster, you're not forced to form opinions on everything around you... it's just all around easier to grow.  The less people know of what you think, the better.

But of course, all of which should raise the question, "Why am I telling you not to share your ideas while I'm writing a thousand word blog post?"

I mean, outside of this class I'm in the business of making media, and it's not like that job would get any harder if everyone around me was completely oblivious to how I viewed the world.  In fact, it would be a heck of a lot easier.  And at some point, I am going to start putting most of my ideas into games, and hopefully that should be accompanied by me not writing nearly as much here or elsewhere.  So why even do it now?

Part of this is the very personal belief I have that the world is an inherently beautiful place, and that if you come with me and see things through my eyes, you'll realize that too.  There's this fundamental idea behind all of communication that we each hold our own views of reality and that we want to share them with others.  We want other people to be in our world, so we share with them, and we want to enter other people's worlds, so we listen to what they share.

So, I guess the answer is that I can't bear to think that there might be other people out there like me, or that could be like me, and that I wouldn't help them out as much as possible no matter what it cost in my own development.  To a certain extent, nearly everything I write is with the perspective, "What would I have wanted to read or know when I was younger?  And how can I facilitate the internalization of that information as much as possible for someone who might come down the same path I did?"

Not that any of that really explains all of what's going on, because as usual, the full picture is much more complicated than anyone including me wants it to be.  There are very specific ways that I tackle the way I write this blog and what specifically I'm willing to share on it at any given point in time, but... I'm not going into any of that with this blog post.

Instead, conclusions.

I know this is the third post in a row that I've brought this up, but just figure out what the heck your goal is already.  Then work communication into that goal.

Nearly every time you connect with someone, you are very slightly closing the door for your own development: you are setting expectations for yourself and you are risking giving someone a view of you that very well could be completely wrong tomorrow.  On top of this, realize that you don't possess the ability to convey your essence in a perfect sense, so the people you communicate with are going to extrapolate and build off of your ideas, and misinterpret what you say, and both correctly and incorrectly build a picture of what they think you are based on a very small part of you.

Make sure you have a reason to do what you do, because it does have a cost.