Practising a point of view
Recently I wrote about the format and motivations of blog entries.
At the crossing point of between the format of "point-of-view" and the motivation of "practising" is the idea of "practising a point of view".
Phillip Adams and Lee Burton wrote a book called Talkback: Emperors of air. One of the chapters written by Phillip Adams included an interesting passage. It suggested that some talkback callers would express bigoted attitudes much like they would try on clothes - to see how they sounded and whether they actually fit. Talkback radio was sufficiently anonymous to just see how the ideas rolled off the tongue.
Well, at least, that's how I remembered it from when I read the book a few years ago. I just tried to find the passage again to illustrate the concept of "practising a point of view". All I found was one line, in a section on how it wasn't always that difficult to talk callers around to modifying or softening their stance.
Many callers were simply rehearsing ideas to see how they felt.
This quote doesn't illustrate my point as strongly as I had hoped, but perhaps my gist gets through.
Maybe it is the act of sitting down and thinking an item through well enough to type it out. Maybe it is the proof-read of the words in black-and-white that reveals to the author the previously hidden gaps in logic. Maybe it is the comments and response that you receive from your audience that makes you see the other point of view. Whatever the case, the act of blogging seems to be used to try out beliefs in a semi-anonymous forum, and allow the to be adapted before they are adopted, without the loss-of-face that might arise from changing your mind in a face-to-face meeting.
To date, I think this idea of practising a point-of-view has been a significant part of the motivation I have used for this blog to date. Whether it should continue in this vein is another story.