The 17th Century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho is considered to be the most important Haiku poet of all time. In their page about the poet, Wikipedia includes this comment, “[Basho's] poems were influenced by his firsthand experience of the world around him.”
This correlates to an idea in Tor Norretranders’ book The User Illusion in which the author discusses “exformation” as all of the relevant sensory stimuli that a speaker or writer processes out of the “information” that he or she includes in communication. However, Norretranders claims that this vast realm of excluded data infuses the communication with meaning, nonetheless. Though unspoken and unwritten, this meaning is actually embedded within the relatively miniscule amount of information communicated, and it can be received by the recipient with a correlating depth of perception.
Currently, the ability of technical mechanisms to communicate sound, light and motion remains a mere fraction of those qualities emanating from the original sources. This means that regardless of the seeming “reality” of a video or audio recording, virtually all of the “exformation” is already deleted. And that means the viewing or listening recipient has far less opportunity to sense or experience or process that vast realm of subtle yet significant sensory stimulus.
For example, to talk about the nature of trees when one has only seen trees on TV, makes for a far less rich understanding than what one could discuss after a single day in a forest. To discuss symphonic music when recordings are one’s only experience, again, greatly reduces the breadth of sensory stimlus that is apprehended in the concert hall. And, when one spends his hours playing First-person shooter games, regardless of how high his score, he will never know the full experience of taking another life that is known by the teenage girl on the abortionist’s table feeling that tiny, other, heartbeat fall silent.
In order, therefore, to communicate in a way that profoundly influences others, engaging firsthand with the world around us is a most powerful way to experience and draw from the infinitude of exformation, which is the richest, freshest and most creative resource for ideas, answers and understanding.