Ooooooh, the idea of Data being pen-pals with Geordi's family is so good, I would love to read it, and I hope you write it someday! It might also be interesting to show Geordi's correspondence with them, too, compare and contrast the different things each thinks are important to tell the family, because I bet you that would be different. If you wanted to make it a sequel to this one, I am fine with sequels and remixes to my work.
I don't think communication is more important in this relationship than in a more "normal" relationship, but I do think that it's going to be more obvious if you don't have it, if that makes sense. With a shared species and shared cultural context, you can just sort of ... assume you each know what the other wants, needs, thinks, and feels, even if that is very much not true. And then you get into problems with no idea how you got there, because the assumptions you've been operating under just aren't true and the foundation you assumed you had isn't actually there, it's just a facade.
Not gonna lie, the idea of Data and Geordi's family communicating is delightful and honestly yes it would be really cool to also show how Geordi and his family communicate. I bet when relaying events they would focus on completely different things, to the extent that they might be conveying entirely different emotions. Like, Data pops in with an cool "almost died today, figured out I have some existential feelings about that but the color of the sky as I was getting shot at was really beautiful and did you know not all skies are blue? there are chemical components not present in earth's atmosphere..." etc etc (he ends up writing a poem), meanwhile Geordi is like "had a small breakdown when Data almost died, send hugs"
lmao
also i agree that their communication is not *more* important than in other relationships, communication is naturally always vital no matter the relationship, but with Data and Geordi there's the extra step of trying to figure out not only inter-species communication, but there's the difference in how their brains work? like, Data's view of reality is fundamentally different than a humans, like any alien, but it's further complicated by the fact that he's inorganic and it's like, how does that affect not only his biases, but the biases he *thinks* he has vs those he can't recognize he has because they're so intrinsic to the way he thinks and sees the world? i don't know, it's a hard thing to articulate, i might be veering into character study territory 😅
Yeah, you might be veering into character study territory, but also, either of the two things you bring up here (the differences in their correspondence and the character study about how Data's mind works) would be really fascinating basis for stories which I would love to read :D
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