Why "emit"?

In Quest of Optimism Beyond the Edge: through avoidance of the answering process (Part #10)

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Beyond the decision by the World Question Center to "emit" its annual question, why did the respondents choose to "emit" their answers? Why the choice of this writer to "emit" this commentary? Such cases call for self-referential reflection if the insights are not merely to be seen as a further contribution to information overload -- cognitive global warming -- requiring appropriate defensive responses in terms of selective attention.

It is intriguing that any such emission may be framed as having components such as:

• a response from a particular perspective to a sense of inadequacy in the pattern of knowledge that would otherwise be produced as definitive. This implies a form of remedial, corrective response to the "pattern that connects" -- an effort to fine tune it to hold some personally intuited sense of greater insight, coherence or even wisdom
• an effort to process the alienating "otherness" of some contributions to the pattern, recognized as a challenge, and thereby to engender a larger whole in the pattern
• a degree of presumption that putting in one's "10 cents worth" is of some significance in the larger scheme of things, if only as an affirmation of one's own identity

There is even a case for considering "emissions" of opinions and explanations -- in academic papers, media pieces, internet discussion lists or blogs -- as functioning in a manner similar to that of "greenhouse gases" by effectively creating a closed conceptual greenhouse within which the creative rays of a symbolic sun are trapped.

The human cognitive world may be effectively dependent on such a sun, as myths of many cultures have always implied -- indicating the existence of processes of psychosynthesis functionally analogous to those of photosynthesis. This is in sympathy with the recognition of belief systems as greenhouses within which it is unwise to "throw stones" (cf Dynamically Gated Conceptual Communities: emergent patterns of isolation within knowledge society, 2004). There might even be some merit to considering how peer review and gatekeeper processes act as appropriate constraints on information emissions -- effectively anticipating the function of the constraints of carbon trading on greenhouse gas emissions.