Tuesday 29 September 2009

Opinions as identity, and learning

I have always enjoyed expressing myself, via words or music. The advent of the Internet into my life has proved very liberating, in affording me the opportunity to do both very cheaply. Of course I don't take sufficient advantage of the Internet, either as a resource or as a channel for expression. The sporadic nature of this blog attests to the latter.

I have been on some stimulating email fora (sorry, did some school Latin and have to show off), but blogging is quite new for me, and has accompanied a lot of changes in my life. Those changes, and reading blogs are making me increasingly interested in learning rather than indulging in language as a self advertisement.

As in daily life, you get more out of people by being concilliatory, and I find myself increasingly drawn to a less flamboyant, or at least less confrontational, mode, in an attempt to find out what others are saying, or mean by what they say, rather than the trench warfare which characterises polarised exchanges, which often don't merit being described as discussion.

Things I have to watch out for to keep a constructive focus.

Understanding the difference between testing/exploring someone else's views in order to better understand them, and trying to win the argument. There's more to belearned from the former, and arguing, even as in debating, can be more fraught with danger than I used to think.

By way of explanation, I need to digress, but it's my blog so I'll digress if I want to.
My recent experience of debating online had been via the mailing list of my former school, a boarding school for blind kids which combined selective entry by competitive examination with a non-fee paying environment, since our fees were paid by our local education authorities. I joined this list a very long time after I left that school, during which time I had deliberately avoided all things to do with blindness and related issues. But, in the nature of such things, even after a long gap, I found, and perhaps wanted to find, that the former students' mail list retained something of the ethos of the place as I remembered it. Although, as boys between 11 and 18, we had our share of physical competition and fights, in this blind and partially sighted environment, it's not perhaps surprising that vigorous debate was very much part of the fabric of everyday life, and I dropped back into that very easily.

Then I encountered blogs, and my natural impulse was to assume that Worcester rules would apply, and everyone would understand that, since I'm crap at chess, debating could fill much the same role, even if discussing matters of genuine importance.

So we all make assumptions about what the rules of engagement are. The chemistry of inter-personal dynamics is, to me at least, very mysterious, in that tension communicates itself to us, and suddenly a discussion can begin to feel like our value has become embodied in our views, and we are defending ourselves, rather than simply stating our opinion about something. So, to be clear, the whole focus of a discussion can change, not just for one party to it, but for both, and to both parties' surprise.

This is of course a particular danger for people who care about what the other thinks, and people who have thought their insecurities safely concealed. So this has left me temporarily somewhat tentative about the rules of engagement for online debate, and I'm concentrating on asking questions related to learning and understanding. Being right and winning are, after all, much less important, or should be.

As a final thought, I would add that, in our dialogue, we need to find a way to convince each other of the difference between "this is what I think", and "I know I am right".

This isn't the post i intended to write, but it's the precursor to the next two which, hopefully, will be what I intended to write.

2 comments:

  1. Reg,

    I find it fascinating that you attribute your debating skills to boarding school. Do you think that the verbal skills are an attempt to make up whatever "disadvantage" you perceived by not being able to see? Honing your verbal communication makes perfect sense in that regard then. In person, too, you cannot see what reaction your words have on people and the internet does not allow that either for either of us, so we are both hampered in that regard. Still, I think our environments as we grow up do have an impact on how we debate now.

    I grew up in a household where we were not allowed to speak out of turn or talk back at all. Debate was unheard of and in school, we were not taught such things as debating. So, it wasn't until college that I learned what it meant to exchange opinions and keep emotions in check. Very hard for me.

    So thanks for this post. It makes me think differently about the whole (pardon the pun) "debate."

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  2. Annie, we could all so easily be creatures of our past, and we can probably never be wholly free of it. But the sincere desire to rise above those aspects of it which we believe hold us back, plus the belief that we're able to do it, as you are plainly doing, gives me a real basis for hope, and a sense of pride in something really good about being human.

    Thank you for your contribution to "the debate".

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