Intro
Many times, those who decide to express their thoughts on text, or capture already existing ideas, repackage and rearrange them in a new way, face a caveat dilemma. One can hardly establish enough caveats before the actual text starts to avoid any unnecessary misunderstandings that will only hinder the effectiveness of the text (if we take this effectiveness as a presentation of ideas in a way that the readers can smoothly incorporate them into their personal webs of meaning).
The dilemma begins when the amount of caveats that we need to establish beforehand begin to harm the reading experience of the text.
If we take the effective presentation of ideas as one of the text’s core purposes, we need to think about clarity, concision and evocative-power. Therefore, we are torn between two choices. First, we can be extensive with our use of caveats. This would certainly lengthen the text, especially the distance between its beginning and the actual moment where it begins getting to the point. However, it would decrease the chances of producing the most unnecessary misunderstandings that would muddle the reader’s consideration of the ideas as he reads them. It would probably also muddle the subsequent discussion of the ideas.
The second choice is to be concise with your text, and trust that there will be a tacit understanding of what the writer would be making caveats for. This would make for a more comfortable and quicker reading experience, as the text would begin developing the ideas right from the start. On the other hand, with a big enough audience, most of what was assumed to be implicit will not be noticed, and its absence will be pointed out, reducing the amount of attention that is set upon the ideas themselves. As we can see, both choices have their advantages and trade-offs. In the internet age, where expediency and straightforwardness is valued because of the phenomenon of attention scarcity and accelerating content proliferation, I’m inclined to think that the second choice is the more prevalent.
Luckily, this is of course not necessarily a dichotomy. With enough skill and awareness we can turn the dilemma into a spectrum, where we can regulate how far we want to be from each choice and how near we want to be to the other. We don’t need to assume that choosing one will instantly cancel the other. Still, it’s a delicate balance, hence the need of having the necessary skill to navigate it.
In many circumstances, the problem can worsen even further when the caveats become necessary only for those readers for whom the text isn’t for. These are the readers for whom the text doesn’t work and consequently will point out the lack of universality in it. This brings us to the first dilemma:
The ‘we’ in collapsed contexts caveat
When a writer expresses an idea, describes and interprets a situation, etc. she has to assume certain things about her reader. Otherwise, she would choose to limit her thought with the restraints of universality, where what applies to everything hardly applies to anything of importance. What causes the restraints of universality is context collapse, because the text will be read by any reader regardless of their background.
Context collapse is a property of textual or other type of recorded communication1 that can read large audiences . Once the creator of the text loses the ability to pick the audience as she distributes it, she loses the benefit of implicit contextual and subtextual elements that accompany a more tailored selection of the audience. Hence the collapse of context: this key component for the proper understanding of a text disappears and can be replaced for any other context according to the reader’s pre-assumptions. Context collapse clearly is par for the course in the internet era, although the proliferation of instant communication means can be used to remedy at least some of it. Indeed, an author can quickly communicate with an audience in an effort to amend whatever misconception that she identifies as circulating in the debate.
Therefore, some of the readers will necessarily not feel identified with the writer’s pre-assumptions as she addresses their hypothetical reader. As a result, they might feel inclined to accuse these pre-assumptions to be false. If they slip a bit further down the slope, they might not only invalidate their relation with the text, but invalidate the whole argument as being based upon false pre-assumptions.
The dilemma is as follows: does the writer need to add a caveat at the beginning of her text, pointing out what kind of person they are referring to, specifically or at least roughly? Or will she choose to leave it to each reader’s judgment to understand that we or you in the text doesn’t mean every possible reader, but mostly the readers who effectively feel identified by what the text is saying and the examples it is using. The advantage of the second choice is that if not defined, some types of readers that the author didn’t have in mind could turn out to be the unintended audience that is even more adequate to it than the intended audience.
It’s funny how some authors use the ‘we’ when we don’t intend to address anyone but a specific type of people who we know would appreciate the text. Nonetheless, we still use the universal ‘we’. It’s too bothersome to say ‘we’ and then add caveats on who we mean as ‘we’ to not make generalisations that will never be applicable to everyone, not to say cumbersome for the reader as well. So we hope that those to whom it applies will get something out of it, and those to whom it doesn’t won’t accuse us of being a bundle of false assumptions. Instead, they will quietly move past it, or make the correct assumption that ‘we’ is not to be taken as a literally ‘every single one of us humans’ but as an intended audience, and then make observations on the ideas accordingly with this caveat in mind.
The search engine and intellectual depths caveat
This dilemma is easier to explain. There is a non-trivial possibility that the ideas that the writer is developing in her texts have already been produced in some or another way by other thinkers in the past. Nonetheless, many writers will opt to express their ideas regardless of this possibility, considering more important that they develop them in their own way, both to communicate them to others and to arrange their own thoughts. They see the rewards of these efforts greater than the downside of it turning out to have already been somehow addressed by a past writer. The question to ask is: what if I look for this idea in the annals of human intellectual thought and once I find it let this disrupt my own thinking process that could have led to a new, valuable presentation of the same idea with a different name and inner arrangement? And what if I haven’t found the idea anywhere but there is still a small risk that I overlooked some place, which might make me accused of being a plagiarist?
The writer could add the following to her list of preliminary caveats before the start of the text: by developing these ideas, I’m not claiming that I’m the only one that came up with them. These are still the product of my own thought but I recognise that other people today or in any other time could have also come up with them. What I mostly intend here is not to be original for the sake of being original, but to give the reader a perspective on things that could be of potential value to them.
The game of mediated identities caveat
Mediated identities in the internet age have the insidious quality of leaving a permanent digital trace behind them that can persist for a very long time. Not only that, but much of it is searchable and findable on the web. I call the process of establishing and managing our online identities a game because it is a process limited by many rules. The rules are, on a lower and more structural level, the interface limits that social media platforms provide. We have only so many slots to fill in order to create our identity. Some of these are profile pictures, bios, comments, posts, what we follow, updates and photo collections. The middle level could consist on the expectations that each platform creates in its culture. For example, how are we expected to speak, what are the signs of status that create hierarchies within the network, what aspect of our lives are we supposed to share in it, what makes for a serious user against a less user, or of course what are you supposed to share from your personal life and in which ways to be considered a legitimate user.
By adhering to all these rules, we are playing a game where we pretend that these are our real identities when in fact they are not. If we want to stay in the game, it is an implicit rule that we need to take care of the traces that we leave and expose enough of our personal identities to be taken as a legitimate player. Needless to say, this is not an unreasonable expectation, as accountability is an important incentive to be extra careful in ensuring that you are willing to stay behind what you say or/and that you believe it.
The downside of these games is that we can end up valuing staying in it more than expressing our more interesting ideas. As we toy with an idea and express it in order to evaluate how true it is against real-world feedback and how much we actually believe in it once we made sense of it in words, we might be risking our online identities and sometimes our very personal identities by leaving a trace that can taint them in the eyes of others. These taints can be thoughts that turned out to be false. Nevertheless, I think that it is important that we have more wiggle room in what chips we can place in this game, because many ideas need to go through external critique and feedback to arrive to a place of being valuable. These are the difficult ideas that a first try will never get right.
It follows then that the caveat that a writer would add is that even if they are the ones expressing these ideas, that they should not yet be taken as something they believe is completely true or that sits perfectly within their belief system. These ideas can be valuable but require refinement that can only happen with multiple scrutiny. Thus, do not attach them so irreversibly to my identity but focus on the idea itself. I think it is important that we discuss it and I don’t want to be me or others to be discouraged to express these ideas because of the restraints that this game of identities creates.
The caveat of expediency or experimentation mistaken for ignorance or laziness
This caveat is somewhat similar to the previous one. There is a paradox in the thinking process where many ideas can be very valuable but not deserving of enough time to be properly, incisively developed. These are the ideas that the writer doesn’t have the time to lead to a cohesive conclusion but that they do have the will to present them unfinished to a public to inspire others to do so. This should not be mistaken for ignorance (thinking that the idea is finished when it clearly is full of holes) or laziness (thinking that half-baked ideas are good enough and no significant effort is required). The real situation is that these expediently expressed ideas can show a thinking approach to a problem that even if not taken to its conclusion, will only need time and more effort to do so.
Such novel approaches can be followed by others who understand the importance of the potential conclusion that they might arrive to. The writer might leave these unfinished thoughts for the public not as a disrespectful gesture, but because they are currently committed to many other projects and ideas and their time and effort limits do not allow them to follow a potentially invaluable thinking path that they identified.
The caveat for this situation is that the author’s intention is not to present the following ideas as something that should be considered finished, nor is it a mere intellectual exercise. While the author thinks that the potential finished idea could be of great real value and deserves to be shared, she cannot at this point fully develop it herself. Nonetheless, she believes what has been developed so far is enough to be beneficial to many readers. Do judge them as such and treat them as such, and do not focus needlessly on assumptions of laziness or ignorance from the author’s part.
Repetition and redundance as exploration vs. exploitation – information/action ratio caveat
Here is another dilemma. An author can be full of original and interesting ideas. They can even be very valuable ideas that if someone chose to execute them, they would bring tangible benefits to the world. So the author chooses to regard her main task as being someone who creates knowledge and meaning and relays it to an audience. One of the main conditions is that her formidable thinking and exposition skills will be channeled through the continuous development of new ideas. Her job is not to execute them, as her core skill is in thinking and exposition, so executing ideas would take time from doing what she is the best at. This is the exploration choice, the information choice.
The other choice is that her mission as a thinker would be in ensuring the wide-spread, real-world effectiveness of a handful of ideas. In this scenario, she would find different creative ways of insisting upon the same ideas over and over again so they become so integrated as if too almost be a constitutive part of their readers’ psyches. This is the exploitation or action choice. The analogy is clear, instead of exploring more territory in our maps of reality, we opt to stay in what we already have mapped and exploit its potential.
Some ways in which the writer can practice this second approach is for example in first explaining the idea in a brief but well devised presentation, as a writer would normally do, and then spending the rest of the year explaining to the readers, through innumerable examples, what the idea isn’t but could be mistaken as, or what instances would be the complete opposite of this idea (clarification by the use of contrasts). Another example would be to re-synthesise and amend the idea constantly, approaching it through different fronts and over-lappings (between the idea and other ideas) again and again. This could be in rephrasing it, repackaging it, summarising it, advice in how to apply it, coming up with new analogies, stories, etc.
This last caveat could be phrased as: the author is aware that she is talking about an idea that she already previously developed. This is not due to a lack of ideas of being a one-trick pony, it is because the author believes that they are precious ideas that would benefit the world greatly if they were executed by readers. In fact, these ideas can be deceptively simple and difficult to enact in the real world, thus it is necessary to repeatedly insist on them through various means. Sometimes it’s valid to believe that the amount of valuable ideas wandering the intellectual ecosystem is vastly out of proportion with the amount of ideas that are actually executed in an age of limitless information access.
To finalise
Although I have spend a considerable amount of words in explaining these caveats, I still do not believe that the writer can and should be in total control. Nonetheless, it would be fantastic if we found a solution for this and were able to remove right from the get-go time-wasting, wrong assumptions that some readers might understandably develop when a text lacks these caveats and many more that I will probably have overlooked. I sincerely think that this could help create a more interesting and productive ecosystem of ideas, debates and applications of ideas that to me right now feels rather over-flooded and wasteful. It is especially wasteful in that many are left out or right out discouraged to develop and share ideas because of the real possibility that rushed assumptions and accusations might completely eclipse their ideas.
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