I am trying to wean myself away from Facebook, and it's not easy: I have many relationships there, enjoy them, and find the chatyping often stimulating. However, as I focus down in this area of "conflict, culture, language, and psychology", the want of books prevails and the yearning to write at greater length, fiction or nonfiction, becomes more prevalent. With age and habits, such transitions may take time, but as much seems to be happening.
In the meantime, before I write my masterpiece for the e-reader, I've this thought to share from a threadchat within Facebook's "Rationalist Society of Pakistan":
We generally experience grammar, linguistic and social, fully installed: our babbling infants have ways of letting us know they have acquired ability to speak a basic lexicon and, shortly after, express themselves in phrases or sentences. We're amazed! Those tiny mewling things can do more than foul their diapers. We don't stop to think about underlying or, to borrow from our computing age, "lower-level source code" and the solidification of ever more fundamental emotion, language, and social relationships. My guess is the basis for overarching, lifetime, and lifestyle attitudes and beliefs may be anchored in that pre-expressive region.
Will the mewling infant turn out an abstract or literal thinker?
Will the same take orders without question? Or incline toward questioning orders?
How will authority be received?
How will having authority be handled?
When the same picks out of the clutter of noise such terms as "Punjabi" or "Baloch" or "Jew" or "Pachtun" what else in inflection, in the chemistry of the body, in next words, in their amplification and emphasis, will accompany the discovery of nouns?
If we think we flatter ourselves if we view only ourselves and, I'll try this for individual effect on environment, our "life regions" of influence, what may be done within a family, what may be done to influence elementary and higher education programs as responsible for a culture-wide intellectual state of affairs.
Nature may be the larger force and presence.
Nonetheless, the relationship between earliest family experience and first expression in language may be an area worth a look IF one wants to change so much of what comes of that earliest experience.
We may not only read hearts through the mouths attached to them, we obtain our own hearts from speech and, probably, even before we know what we are hearing -- and then, so very young, perhaps even before we know what we are saying.
Communicating Arts - Main Web Site