Right now I'm reading Persuasive Technology. Since I'm working in the background to organize all the thoughts here on HTBA into something that you might consider a book, I find myself thinking about this sort of residual effect from reading books these days. I'm learning the content of the book, but there's also this metalearning of understanding how books are written.
It's a concept I think about a lot, actually. Another couple of examples below:
There's the value of following someone on twitter to read their thoughts, but then there's also the metavalue of following a service or cause to provide a bit of support (even if I never actually get to reading any of their tweets).
There's emailing someone to give them information, but then there's also the residual effect of letting them know you're actively working/thinking on it (think: working from home).
I think of this as the act of compressing/encoding information, something like "linguistic programming." It's part of this larger framework I'm working on in the background, another sneak peek in the screenshot below:
