INFODUMP

Autism and information sharing

Have you heard that term? “infodumping” ??? It refers to information sharing.
It seems to have its origins in negative attitude toward the autistic inclination to share information.

I began reading in depth about infodumping or information sharing recently.

Of course most articles were about children and how to keep them from “infodumping”, redirection was the most frequently advised response. I recently met a mother and her autistic offspring. Mother told her children directly, when I want to know about that, I’ll ask you. (a less direct way to say “shut up”, “I don’t want to hear from you” ) What message does that send to those children? ( see the last statement in above parentheses ).

When we are enthusiastic about any topic, we want to share the excitement of what we are learning, have learned, with others. We reach out to share what seems like magic, stimulating, enthusiasm-making information only to be rejected and told our excitement and interest does not matter, that nobody wants to hear about it.

Information sharing is one of the primary ways we reach out to others, and can be used to teach conversation skills, reinforce self esteem, and our enthusiasm for any subject can be used to help us find our way in the world.

Associate any task with our interest and you have our immediate attention. Example: I hated math in general when young, but when I learned I would need math to calculate how much hay to buy my(imaginary back then) horses for a day, a month, a year, etc. I could see it was something I would need. Doing math problems about horse related things made me less resistant and more receptive to using math.

Information sharing is a way of trying to reach out and make our interests relevant and interesting to others as well.

In reading about infodumping/ sharing interests I figured out that my blog and my FB interest groups were all forms of information sharing. We don’t share emotions, we share facts.

Somewhere very early on in my life I learned to hide my feelings and that they were useless to me. Instead I figured out that facts were tools that I could use to figure many things out. I could not trust my emotions or my peers/parents/siblings emotions to guide my behavior and my thoughts, instead I relied on what I thought were facts.

I immersed myself in learning facts, finding more out about any topic that interested me. Facts were tools I could use, could relate to, and they did not change from day to day, and if they did change, I could get more information to understand why.

Today, my life is still filled with “information sharing” activity, maybe even more than before. I have hope that others like me will understand and find relief and enlightenment in the sharing of autism related information.

My daily researching and interacting with others on line, information sharing of things related to my favorite topics , is me trying to help others, attempting to help with answers to questions or information to apply to ways to understand ourselves.

Look at information sharing as making oneself vulnerable in order to share a small part of one’s passions and caring.

Look beyond the fact that YOU might not be interested, but that the person sharing the facts they have so passionately gathered with you in order to find a connection or recognition of the things that are important to them.

Can you see the person and the enthusiasms, the passion, the interest in that “infodumping” person wanting an interaction so badly with you and hoping you might understand?

Communication is always a “2 way” (or more ways with more people) thing. Are you doing your part to reach out to the autistic individuals in your life? Do you expect them to interact with you on your terms only, in your way, expecting them to adapt and interact only in ways of your choosing? Or are you willing to look behind simply expecting certain behaviors and communication on your terms and see how hard the autistic individual is trying to relate or get you to relate to them?
Are you willing to learn about the ways autistic individuals communicate, and reach out to understand, accommodate, and learn more about their lives, their experiences, their unique abilities and gifts as well as blaming and shaming, coercing them to fit society’s idea about what they “should” be, instead of who and what they are?