Noam Chomsky is the only person I have heard talk about Concision, but I feel it is a very important word, particularly for internet discussions. So I want to first define what it means and then talk about the effect it is having on me at the moment.
Jump to about the 30 minute mark in the above video and watch for about 3 minutes. Noam describes why he will never be on a TV interview program. I don't want to discuss the politics of what he is saying, even though I agree with him on a lot of political issues, my focus is on the word Concision.
For the lazy fucks who wont watch the video, Concision is the property of a statement to be sufficiently concise as to require no further explanation to be acceptable.
For example, someone might say "Osama Bin Laden is evil" or someone might say "Osama Bin Laden is good". The first statement can be made with ease. Nobody would challenge me at all. However, in order for someone to say the second statement, they would be required to produce ENORMOUS quantities of evidence. Even then, even if their position was rationally defensible, they would probably still be dismissed.
Obviously I chose an extreme example, but it works because there is a huge volume of accumulated cultural knowledge that backs up the first statement and NONE to back up the second.
Noam Chomsky talks about it in relation to media, that Concision prevents people with being able to even get on TV if their views depart from the mainsteam by a certain degree. If you agree with mainsteam opinion, you can talk all you want. If you don't, the standards of evidence are so high that you basically cannot get on TV. Over time this results in extreme insularity and lack of significant differences of opinion.
Okay, so now you know what Concision means.
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I feel like that there are a lot of people in the blogosphere who lack concision, myself being one of them. These people have accumulated an amount of experience and when they make a statement it is standing on a multitude of underlying assumptions based on that experience. However, these people make blog posts and they are subjected to comments, often from people who were hoping for concision.
It hasn't happened to me lately, but it has happened to me. I saw it happen to someone else recently. And I am starting to form a broader "theory of the internets" that combines the concept of concision with Ryan Macklin's theory of how the internet cannot do criticism well.
Basically, my theory is that the internet has a certain..... bandwidth for thoughts. And if a thought is too complex to fit in the bandwidth, then it causes problems. I think this bandwidth is much larger than television's, so it is a superior medium in that respect, but if you cannot completely defend the thought in a few paragraphs, it can run into these kinds of problems. People tolerance of reading eventually gives way and they get frustrated that you are not making sense to them yet.
The reason why this is dominating my thoughts tonight is because I have this thought about WotC and the state of D&D, but I cannot find a way to synthesize the thought down to the point that it can be easily described. So I feel that if I posted it, there would be "well, that's just your opinion" and similar sentiments. Or there would be critiques citing highly specific examples that will turn the comments into a wild goose chase of tangents. Or something similar. Basically, I am afraid that the "internets" would strike and thus the point of the post would be lost on too many people.
Does that make sense? Does this post even have concision?
I'm just trying to sort through some complex shit tonight.
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