Context
Oxford Dictionary defines context as the following:
The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.
Context is a necessary part of sensemaking. People are highly contextual creatures, and our experiences are inextricably tied to context, much like our experiences are inextricably tied to time. All action, choice, interpretation, phenomenon, and thought occur within a particular context. Context can help explain why and how something or someone is.
Related concepts include context collapse and hypercontextualization.
Context collapse
Context collapse is the phenomenon of removing relevant context from a piece of information.
This term often used to describe the modern day feeds of social media and news. Every tweet, post, etc. has been necessarily stripped down and formatted to fit that particular platform. The information in that post exists independently of any other post within the same feed. Consuming these posts allow you to reach a wide breadth of information without digging very deep per post, which is great for entertainment purposes. Each post exudes importance on its own, but taken amongst the other posts and examined all at once leads to chaos and nonsense.
I first heard of the term context collapse in How to Do Nothing by Jenny O’Dell, but Mike Caulfield alludes to this concept a number of years prior in his section about Streams in his keynote The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral.
Hypercontextualization
Hypercontextualization is the process of emphasizing context and making it explicit, or even central, to the experience you deliver.
Digital gardens are an example of a hypercontextualized space, where ideas are defined by their relationship to other ideas, rather than something like chronology or suggestions based on your previous actions (i.e. algorithms). While chronology and suggestions are helpful in context collapse, defining ideas based on relationships help strengthen (or weaken) ideas over time, resulting in more sense-making over time – particularly as the web of relationships grow.
Pages that link here
What are digital gardens?
essayDigital gardens are a philosophy of sharing content. It’s similar to blogging, but instead of sharing isolated posts each time, you post unfinished ideas that you come back to, build on, connect, and eventually grow...
The illusion of self-expression
essayIt’s no secret that social media use among teens has stoked concerns around how it might impact their mental health. The jury is still out on whether that’s actually true, especially because there isn’t even...
How to Do Nothing
note“I am concerned about the effects of current social media on expression. Including the right to not express oneself and it’s deliberately addicting features” Value vs. productivity/usefulness Useful for WHO? How is the empty vessel...
Emojis
noteEmoji can be a useful tool to communicate nuance in spaces where body language can’t do the communicating.
Post-truth
notePost-truth is a concept, or an anxietyWikipedia entry on post-truth visit, where delineations in assertions as fact or not-fact are blurred. In contexts of politics, media, and the internet, post-truth is often identified by the...
Context and sensemaking
thoughtThinking lately about how context is so intimately central to the way we understand the world around us. Seeing the same information before and after a few key pieces of context is transformative.
Recontextualizing privacy
thoughtOne of the chief observations made about social media is that content becomes completely context decontextualized, leading to a ton of noise and ultimately watering down the efficacy and value of any given piece of...