mackenzian

  • About
  • Articles
  • Services
    • Who Works With Us
    • Concepts
  • Reading List
    • Most-Read Articles
  • Mentions
  • Contact

More visible and less understood

May 10, 2017 By mackenzian

I first read the phrase “context collapse” from civic tech analyst Zeynep Tufekci and sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom. For more than six years, Zufekci and Cottom have each written about how social media popularity collapses the boundaries between digital audiences.

By becoming extremely popular (“going viral”), information shaped for one audience can rapidly become information shared with all audiences. Even if an item’s original audience was sympathetic, once that item has gone viral, there are no guarantees about how it will land with its new audiences, which features they’ll fall in love with, and which they’ll reject, or why.

The images, actions, and words captured by the lens at any moment can be transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved (the performer must assume) for all time.” —via Tom Critchlow, April 30, 2017

There are also costs to that heightened connectivity, and we don’t all share the costs equally.

As Tufekci wrote last spring, the same information highway that makes minoritized communities more visible and thus more vulnerable is the same network that fundamentalists and supremacists use to find one another and spur each other on.

Being social creatures means scanning our spaces for contextual clues: what, where, with whom, and why. Going viral means collapsing the boundaries that give each group its unique shape, and losing that context means losing perspective that would allow us to perceive others more accurately.

In fact, virality can often make it harder to interpret the Other. In the absence of local cultural knowledge, projection dominates and we all default to our habitual ways of telling stories.

In 2011, Facebook users were starting to express feelings of being over-exposed. and we were self-censoring to mitigate that sudden and non-consensual exposure. (I was one of these users.) Posts we create for our private pages become posts that our followers ask our permission to share, and a share from the right or wrong reader or mediator can mean the difference between open hearts and shiny eyes and a whole army of orcs in the comment section!

Consider what you know about original context as you encounter new stories and sources: how clear is it that these stories were designed for a different audience than the undifferentiated public? In what ways are you “reading other people’s mail”?

Filed Under: general Tagged With: audience, context collapse

Keisha E. McKenzie, PhD

McKenzie Consulting Group
@mackenzian

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Google+
  • Linkedin
  • Medium
  • Phone
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Find Keisha in the World

Basecamps: Deer and rabbit country, MD, and Harlem, NYC

18-22 January: Creating Change 2017, Philadelphia, PA

22 April: Sabbath: Rest and Resistance. CityLights, NYC

6-8 July: (Seventh-day Adventist) Kinship Kampmeeting, San Diego, CA

3-5 August: (Metropolitan Community Churches) People of African Descent, Friends, and Advocates Conference, St. Louis, MO

28-30 September: (Reformed Church in America) Enough Room at the Table. Room for All National Conference, Holland, MI

October: [Subscribe for details] Boulder, CO and Kingston, Jamaica

31 October-2 November: Generations of Love and Justice, St. Louis, MO

1-31 December: At basecamps, hibernating. Enjoy the holidays!

Let Keisha Write for You

Colleagues

A Just Faith
Adventist Forum
Adventist Today
Auburn Seminary
CityLights Community
Climate Stew
New Hope Adventist Church
Renewed Heart Ministries

Join the Inner Circle

  • Facebook
  • Linkedin
  • Twitter

Work With Keisha

I support a wide range of clients and organizations, and I'd love to talk with you about how I can support you.

Send me a note about your project: when you fill out the contact form, a message comes directly to me.

If I'm not available to help you, it's very likely I'll know someone who can!

Site Content

Copyright © 2016-2017 Keisha E. McKenzie for McKenzie Consulting Group, LLC (mackenzian).

Contact me to discuss paid writing opportunities, re-use permissions, and not-for-profit republication terms.

Scholars and researchers may reference my work with full attribution: please let me know what you're working on so that I can help you publicize it.

Copyright © 2018 · Website by Keisha E. McKenzie and McKenzie Consulting Group · Supported by WordPress and Genesis