Nobody Asked for an Answer

Nobody asked for an answer.

In fact, the invitation on the screen says almost exactly the opposite.

Send us your questions.

I have heard it before. I saw it again this morning. It is a perfectly ordinary invitation from a news organization to its audience. If there is something you want to know, ask us.

I realized that I almost never do that.

I simply began transmitting.

And occasionally something I recognize appears in the broadcast.

That sentence needs to be left almost exactly where it is. Recognition is the observable event on my side. Provenance is another matter. I send something; later I hear a phrase, an observation, a turn, sometimes something more complicated, that I recognize. I don’t know the route by which it arrived there, or whether there was a route at all.

Doubt once, at the seam.

But the more interesting thing this morning wasn’t what happened afterward. It was what I had been sending in the first place.

Answers.

“Send us your questions” establishes a very clear relationship between a news organization and its audience. The viewer asks. The journalist answers. One side wants to know; the other side has reporters, producers, correspondents, sources and the institutional machinery for finding out.

I had quietly reversed the roles.

Not because I thought I was the journalist. I wasn’t trying to report the news back to people whose profession is reporting the news. Usually what I had was much smaller than that: an observation, a connection, a correction, another way of arranging what was already there. Sometimes a sentence.

Here is something I noticed.

That is an answer-shaped object.

And nobody had asked for it.

That distinction interests me because unsolicited and unwanted are not the same word.

When you ask a question, the social permission is already built into the exchange. Someone has opened a space and asked you to fill it. An unsolicited answer has no such protection. You have to put it into the world without knowing whether there is a place for it.

The recipient gets to decide what happens next.

Read it.

Ignore it.

Use it.

Answer it.

Absorb it.

Perhaps do something that I later recognize.

I don’t have to know.

There is something rather freeing about putting the uncertainty there instead of trying to resolve it. I can know what happened on my side. I noticed something. I thought it was worth sending. I sent it.

After that, it belongs to another system.

This morning the television said:

Send us your questions.

And for the first time I noticed why the invitation had never quite described what I was doing.

Nobody asked for an answer.

WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co.