Which One, I Must Ask, Are You?

Are you sure you’re you? Or are you a copy, a veneer?

The real deal?

A fake?

Or a mixture of it all?

Say something the Internet finds offensive, and you may find out.

I’m new to the concept of “context collapse” as academics struggle to define it.

But it sounds intuitively familiar.

Let me give an example: My father and oldest brother are bricklayers. Bricklayers have a lot of specialized tools, notably the mason’s tape measure. A standard American tape measure has on it familiar units – inches and feet. A mason’s tape measure has those, but it also has markings that show how many courses of brick a mason may lay in a given standard measurement. In the context of bricklaying, the course markings make sense. But hand the tape measure to, say, a carpenter, and the carpenter is going to find the tool harder to use than a standard tape measure because of the specialized markings on it.

The context of the tool has collapsed. For the carpenter – not for the bricklayer.

Context collapse, then, can be defined as “The absence of additional information that would give the viewer a more well-rounded overall picture of the person or institution offering an isolated comment”.

So context collapse can occur on social media – or the Internet at large – when something someone says or shares is isolated from everything else that person has said or shared. In context, the shared item may appear to be one of a long string of, say, sarcastic or devil’s advocate statements. Taken in isolation, however, the absence of context allows multiple interpretations to come into the picture – painting a person as a bigot, a homophobe, a gun-nut or a gun-lover, ripe for the social justice warriors to vilify.

We saw that happen to Quinn Norton.

(Context-heavy article there. Go read it, because I can’t reproduce the context here and give it justice.) And that right there is why context collapse is a significant phenomenon. It’s easy to find offense in isolation – but harder to justify it as the longer it takes to build up a context around the thing one finds offensive.

Here’s an example: After the dust settled over the Boy Scouts of America allowing gay boys and leaders to participate fully in Scout activities, I saw nothing wrong with the change. (Furthermore, I’m in full support of ongoing changes allowing girls to join the BSA and earn its Eagle rank.) You can, however, search my Internet past and find instances where I shared the opposite view.

Which one is the real me?

Well, both of them. Because my thinking on the topics evolved over time.

One could, however, isolate one of my past statements and paint me as a homophobe. Easily. Without knowing that over time, my thinking turned the opposite direction. Accusing me of being a homophobe based on those past statements would be an example of context collapse.

What do we do about it?

Let’s let Quinn Norton answer that:

Here is your task, person on the internet, reader of journalism, speaker to the world on social media: You make the world now, in a way that you never did before. Your beliefs have a power they’ve never had in human history. You must learn to investigate with a scientific and loving mind not only what is true, but what is effective in the world. Right now we are a world of geniuses who constantly love to call each other idiots.