Abstract
Sometimes we overexamine ourselves. Today's discourse styles have framed us into a constraint of self-repetitions, in either virtual or traditional, in-person dialogues. Much of this was induced by our disolving attention span and patience, and yet there is something else that invaded into our discourse and became part of the hindrance to effective speech. This short article presents a tentative "theory" of why we are repeating and telling ourselves things with certainty, mostly in words, that we already knew implicitly and were already able to conceptualize in other forms of meaning-making. Such misplaced, pseudo-necessity can be surprisingly costly in contexts like collegiate classrooms. Beyond, the same question for individuals, what about at the group level for the general public? The author further concludes that this self-repetitive, sometimes toxic pattern is part of what he calls the "common knowledge predicament" in that all of us suffer more or less from the lack of understanding, or even misunderstood conventions, among a supposedly mutually-repsected population who are, counterintuitively, subject to the illiteracy epidemic.
Author Information
D. Tony Sun, Yeshiva University, United States
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