MINDSPEAK
by Catharine Vinson

Words come into being of necessity. The oil patch has its monkey cages. Mathematicians have fuzzy sets. Typesetters have widows and orphans. Teleconferencers have a lexicon, too. One that grows daily, as more people discover "green screens," online" feels like to them.

"Mindspeak" is one attempt to describe the particular type of communication that often develops among conferencers. The process of inventing the term began with a letter. Written nearly two years ago, that electronic letter was a first, groping attempt to explain to a doubting Thomas what a few of us shared in Delphi's real time conferencing environment. It was a first attempt to label what some of us thought we were experiencing but had been too "rational"--and maybe too shy--to mention.

The naming took a long time. "Rapport." "Bonding." "Empathy." It was like creating a thesaurus for a word that did not exist. Then suddenly the word came: mindspeak. I don't remember which one of us said it first, but it fit.

But "it" lacked a tidy definition, so some of us continued to poke and prod. Yet we hesitated to analyze. I think we were afraid we'd lose it if we scrutinized too closely. Still, I wondered and started a conference called "Mindspeak" on a new
system called Unison. Did people from other networks ever feel it? Was it an isolated phenomenon limited to real time conferencing?

The phenomenon was not isolated. People who had never participated in Delphi's "Conference" wrote of their experiences. The term--and the experience--expanded. Interestingly, the attempts at definition in that conference always took a back seat to the process itself. People didn't talk about mindspeak so much as they *did* it. The doing added to the richness of a process that becomes recursive with time and practice. More cyclic than linear, mindspeak seems to ebb and flow according to its own rules. It can't be switched on and off. All it seems to demand is that one "leaves his ego outside the door" and listens.

A year later, on STC, I started another "Mindspeak". Would it be different? Would the two conferences communicate?

To date, the conference on STC is very different from the conference I created on Unison. Far more analytical, more intellectual, it's punctuated with some doubt: Does mindspeak really exist? Is it real or some sort of wishful thinking?

What do the differences prove? I don't know. Yet I'm convinced mindspeak occurs throughout the "nets." Some people simply don't "get it." Some don't want it. Some misuse it. But it's there. For some of us, it is "how we were meant to
communicate:" on-land and up-here.

Still, what is it?

I don't think anyone knows. Yet. I don't think mindspeak is contingent on the medium. The medium merely serves as an enabling condition, albeit a superb one. I suspect there may be some neurological basis to mindspeak. While meaning is not stimulus-bound, the brain responds to the written and spoken word quite differently, creating electromagnetic patterns tied to both content and context. It would follow that the patterns created in response to the stimulus of words scrolling across a screen are rather different from those resulting from spoken or traditionally-written words. Too, teleconferencing alters the stimulus threshold. As a result of the speed at which information is presented and processed, "information overload" occurs more rapidly.

Finally, there probably is a correlation between mindspeak and the intense focusing and concentration that results when we try to glean meaning in an environment of partial sensory deprivation. We don't have the usual clues and cues that lead to what we call "meaning." We have to fill in the gaps, listen with the proverbial "third ear" if we are to form the gestalt.

For me, the gestalt is more than the meaning of another person's words. It *is* the other person. Because of that, mindspeak's meaning probably can't be fixed. Mindspeak is as varied as the people who experience the process. For now though, I'll define the essence and attraction of mindspeak simply as a "touching" and an imprinting that goes far deeper than skin: a coming to know another person--not as a bodiless "transmitter" or "receiver"--but as the individual, the "self." An inadequate dictionary definition, but good enough until someone finds the *right* word.

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Author's note: Catharine Vinson (a.k.a. Grendel) is a
professional writer from Houston, Texas. She is also a Helper
on Parti on The Source.