Monday 30 March 2015

Share Your Thoughts: Do Discussions Ever Get Old?

Hello, there and welcome back! Make sure you're sitting comfortably, and get ready to share your thoughts! This is a new periodical feature here at Book For Thought, where we can come together to discuss bookish topics. As with everything else here, if you have any comments on the feature in general, or you would like to suggest a topic for a future discussion, feel free to email me (address in the About Me page). So, let's get talking!
I've been meaning to start a new discussion feature for a while now. I must have started this post a thousand times, but I just couldn't bring myself to actually ever finish it. "Why is that?" I hear you asking. Well, since you insist, it would be rude not to tell you. The reason is actually pretty simple. Every topic I came up with just felt not very original (or, in some cases, not at all). The more I racked my brain to come up with an original idea for a discussion, the more I realised that all the topics I was picking had already been discussed before by other bloggers. A quick Google search for each topic brought me pages and pages of results, and I just felt like there was no point in me discussing the issue, because it had been done so many times before already, and I'm not entirely sure I could actually add anything of value to the multiple discussions that were already out there.

But that actually got me thinking, can a topic ever be "over-discussed"? I know it's incredibly hard to actually come up with an idea that no-one, EVER thought before. I mean, there probably are some bloggers out there who have already tackled this topic, it's just that I haven't really come across them before. But sometimes, it feels to me like some topics have been discussed by everyone and there really isn't much more left to say. Still, I am pretty conflicted about this, since I actually love to hear what each person has to say on a specific topic, because they are bound to add their own personal spin to it, and that is something I LOVE and it's one of the reasons I am so fond of the book blogging community.

On the other hand, though, there are only so many things one can say on long-time favourite discussion topics, such as "paperbacks vs hardbacks", for instance (I am a paperback-lover, by the way. Just in case you were wondering). And while I love reading what everyone has to say, and finding out their own personal reasons for falling on one side of the fence or the other (or even sitting on it, if you're one of those people), sometimes I can't help but feel like it's all been said before, and I actually end up skim-reading the whole post and not really engaging in the discussion because of the over-exposure to the topic.

So, I guess what I really want to know is, am I alone in this? Do you also feel like some topics have been over-discussed, or do you actually like reading everyone's opinion on a given topic, even if you've heard that discussion umpteen times before? And is there really such a thing as over-discussing a topic?

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