Cognologs are go!
Your free daily drip-feed of thought provocation is now available.
New readers start here
A Cognolog is five small suggestive paragraphs drip-fed one per day. The purpose is to encourage imaginative and critical thinking and also to provide topics for conversation and exploration.
The trouble with everyday written articles is (1) that they don’t really give enough pause-for-thought and (2) they tend to steer the reader, often quite strongly, along the author’s preferred line of argument. See – That’s what I’ve just done!
On the other hand if the object was to fizz-up the reader’s brains …
… the author might provoke thought …
… then pause a while …
… then continue, perhaps at a tangent…
… why a tangent? …
… to look at the thread from a different angle.
The reader isn’t expected to come up with any ‘right answer’ merely to be amused by the possibilities suggested and perhaps join in with a thread on one day then have the author shine the spotlight on that thread from another direction on the next. A simple example of this might be
Tuesday “Is the ‘greatness’ of movie stars the same ‘greatness’ of leaders, generals, statesmen etc.?”
Wednesday Is the ‘greatness’ of some literature related to the previous ‘greatnesses’?
You can see the process is paced to encourage the reader to follow their own fancies. Perhaps Monday’s provocation leads some readers to think about the dichotomy of actor and role, real-life and on-screen idols, degree of viewer’s identification with the actor or the character on the screen. Or perhaps the degree to which ‘greatness’ developed later or was apparent at an early age. Or perhaps the public relations machinery and how that works. Thursday’s provocation might be a disputable statement such as “ ‘Greatness’ is just a fancy name for ‘significance’. Now the reader has a day to get a lot further than ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ by picking it to pieces.
There’s another important use for Cognologs beyond juicing-up brains and that’s discovering through conversation in the office or the pub who are the shallow people and who take an interest in looking at issues requiring intellectual effort.
I’ve invented the Cognolog format. Currently there are more than two dozen covering all manner of subjects and approaches including Gardening – What’s special about gardening and how to ‘get the bug’? , Santa Claus is dead – replacement shenanigans and The press-up club – A practical experiment into what makes joining a club special.
Start now
Another introductory blog post
A cognostory blog post
