{"id":6887,"date":"2016-04-10T11:40:35","date_gmt":"2016-04-10T17:40:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6887"},"modified":"2016-07-23T10:03:44","modified_gmt":"2016-07-23T16:03:44","slug":"context-collapse-and-context-restoration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6887","title":{"rendered":"Context collapse and context restoration"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"wall\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Facebook has a problem. Its members aren’t sharing as much as they used to. At least they’re not sharing firsthand<\/em> the way they used to. Instead of posting notices about what they’re doing or thinking, or where they\u00a0are, or whom they’re hanging out with, they’re just recycling\u00a0secondhand<\/em>\u00a0stuff \u2014 news stories, songs, other people’s photos or tweets, YouTube videos, etc. The\u00a0nature of what they share on the network is changing\u00a0from the personal to the impersonal, from the informal to the formal, from the subjective to the objective. To put it into media terms, which would seem to be the appropriate terms, they\u00a0are\u00a0shifting their role from that of actor to that of producer or publisher or aggregator.<\/p>\n

To the extent that people still post reports on their firsthand experiences, they’re tending to use\u00a0more selective networks, like Snapchat, that offer more precise audience control. People are\u00a0retreating from public displays of experience to more private displays. They’re shifting\u00a0from mass media to narrower media that, in their intimacy, more closely resemble traditional\u00a0social settings.<\/p>\n

Because Facebook feeds on personal sharing the way a vampire\u00a0feeds on blood\u00a0\u2014 the more intimate the information you publish, the more Facebook knows about you, and the more precisely\u00a0it can tailor ads and other messages\u00a0\u2014 any decline in personal sharing is ominous for the company. It’s no surprise that\u00a0Facebook is now trying to figure out some interface tweaks and tricks that will, as a company spokesperson puts it<\/a>, “make sharing on Facebook more fun and dynamic.” It’s hard not to\u00a0hear a hint of desperation in that statement.<\/p>\n

Facebook employees,\u00a0according to a Bloomberg story<\/a>, refer to the curtailment\u00a0of personal sharing\u00a0as “context collapse.”\u00a0But that’s completely wrong.\u00a0Context collapse<\/em> is a sociological term of art that describes<\/a>\u00a0the way social media tend to erase the boundaries that once\u00a0defined people’s social lives. Before social media\u00a0came along, your social life played out in different and largely separate spheres. You had your friends in one sphere, your family members in another sphere, your coworkers in still another sphere, and so on.\u00a0The spheres overlapped, but they remained distinct. The self you presented to your family was not the same self you presented to your friends, and the self you presented to your friends was not the one you presented to the people you worked with or went to school with. With a social network like Facebook, all these spheres merge into a single sphere. Everybody sees what you’re doing. Context collapses.<\/p>\n

When Mark Zuckerberg infamously said, “You have one identity; the days of you having a different image for your work friends or your co-workers and for the people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly,” he was celebrating context collapse. Context collapse is a wonderful thing for a company like Facebook because a uniform self, a self without context, is easy\u00a0to package as a commodity. The protean self is a fly in the Facebook ointment.<\/p>\n

Facebook’s problem now is not context collapse but its opposite: context restoration. When people start backing away from broadcasting intimate details about themselves, it’s a sign that they’re looking to reestablish some boundaries in their social lives, to mend the walls that social media has broken. It’s an acknowledgment that the\u00a0collapse of multiple social contexts into a single one-size-fits-all context circumscribes a person’s\u00a0freedom. There’s only so much fun you can have if you know that your mom, your boss, and your weird neighbor are all watching. The protean self, we’re rediscovering, is a more comfortable self than the uniform self. Being forced into “one identity” is a drag.<\/p>\n

There’s something else going on here, too. We’re learning how difficult and exhausting\u00a0it is to sustain a mass-media presence. The problem with broadcasting everyday experience is that everyday experience is inevitably repetitive, and repetitiveness\u00a0is, in a media context, the kiss of death. To remain interesting when viewed at a distance, when viewed through media, a person has\u00a0to display continuing novelty \u2014 novelty of experience, novelty of thought. Very few of us can do that for very long. I imagine that, on Facebook, even Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker would have worn out their\u00a0welcomes after a while.<\/p>\n

The repetitiveness\u00a0of our lives remains interesting to our family and our close friends, but outside that intimate context it gets boring.\u00a0As reality TV stars, we all face declining ratings and, in the end, cancellation.<\/p>\n

Photo: Justin Pickard<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Facebook has a problem. Its members aren’t sharing as much as they used to. At least they’re not sharing firsthand the way they used to. Instead of posting notices about what they’re doing or thinking, or where they\u00a0are, or whom they’re hanging out with, they’re just recycling\u00a0secondhand\u00a0stuff \u2014 news stories, songs, other people’s photos or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6887"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7187,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6887\/revisions\/7187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}