# notes --- - [[{1.2a2e} content collapse]] - the cozyweb is context restoration? [[{1.2a2} context collapse]] # highlights --- > [!highlight]+ Mon Jun 03 2024 14:10:05 GMT-0400 > > On a social network, the theory went, all those different contexts collapsed into a single context. Whenever you posted a message or a photograph or a video, it could be seen by your friends, your parents, your coworkers, your bosses, and your teachers, not to mention the amorphous mass known as the general public. And, because the post was recorded, it could be seen by future audiences as well as the immediate one. > [!highlight]+ Mon Jun 03 2024 14:10:05 GMT-0400 > > Wesch described the experience in suitably melodramatic terms in an influential 2009 article about the pioneering vloggers on YouTube: > >The problem is not a lack of context. It is context collapse: an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording. 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. The little glass lens becomes the gateway to a black hole sucking all of time and space — virtually all possible contexts —in on itself. The would-be vlogger, now frozen in front of this black hole of contexts, faces a crisis of self-presentation. ^6859cd > [!highlight]+ Mon Jun 03 2024 14:10:05 GMT-0400 > > In a 2010 interview with the journalist David Kirkpatrick, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg put it bluntly: “You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” Zuckerberg praised context collapse as a force for moral cleanliness: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Facebook forces us to be pure. > > oof this is aggressive > [!highlight]+ Mon Jun 03 2024 14:10:05 GMT-0400 > > lapse. It’s a story of its opposite: context restoration. Young people led the way, moving much of their online conversation from the public platform of Facebook, where parents and teachers lurked, to the more intimate platform of Snapchat, where they could restrict their audience and where messages disappeared quickly. Private accounts became popular on other social networks as well. Group chats and group texts proliferated. > > coZyweb is context restoration > [!highlight]+ Mon Jun 03 2024 14:10:05 GMT-0400 > > a very different kind of collapse — content collapse — will be the more consequential legacy of social media > [!highlight]+ Mon Jun 03 2024 14:10:05 GMT-0400 > > tendency of social media to blur traditional distinctions among once distinct types of information — distinctions of form, register, sense, and importance. As social media becomes the main conduit for information of all sorts — personal correspondence, news and opinion, entertainment, art, instruction, and on and on — it homogenizes that information as well as our responses to it. > [!highlight]+ Mon Jun 03 2024 14:10:05 GMT-0400 > > Digitization made it possible to deliver information that had required specialized mediums — newspapers and magazines, vinyl records and cassettes, radios, TVs, telephones, cinemas, etc. — through a single, universal medium. In the process, the formal standards and organizational hierarchies inherent to the old mediums began to disappear. The computer flattened everything. > [!highlight]+ Mon Jun 03 2024 14:10:05 GMT-0400 > > It wasn’t just that the headlines, free-floating, decontextualized motes of journalism ginned up to trigger reflexive mouse clicks, had displaced the stories. It was that the whole organizing structure of the newspaper, its epistemological architecture, had been junked > [!highlight]+ Mon Jun 03 2024 14:10:05 GMT-0400 > > The cacophony of the RSS feed, it’s now clear, heralded a sea change in the distribution and consumption of information. The new order would be disorder. > [!highlight]+ Mon Jun 03 2024 14:10:05 GMT-0400 > > In discussing the appeal of the News Feed in that same interview with Kirkpatrick, Zuckerberg observed, “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” The statement is grotesque not because it’s false — it’s completely true — but because it’s a category error. It yokes together in an obscene comparison two events of radically different scale and import. And yet, in his tone-deaf way, Zuckerberg managed to express the reality of content collapse. When it comes to information, social media renders category errors obsolete. > [!highlight]+ Mon Jun 03 2024 14:10:05 GMT-0400 > > The rise of the smartphone has completed the collapse of content. The diminutive size of the device’s screen further compacted all forms of information. The instant notifications and infinite scrolls that became the phone’s default design standards required that all information be rendered in a way that could be taken in at a glance, further blurring the old distinctions between types of content. Now all information belongs to a single category, and it all pours through a single channel. > [!highlight]+ Mon Jun 03 2024 14:10:05 GMT-0400 > > by leveling everything, social media also trivializes everything — freed of barriers, information, like water, pools at the lowest possible level > > when nothing is important everything is > [!highlight]+ Mon Jun 03 2024 14:10:05 GMT-0400 > > as all information consolidates on social media, we respond to it using the same small set of tools the platforms provide for us. Our responses become homogenized, too. That’s true of both the form of the responses (repost, retweet, like, heart, hashtag, fire emoji) and their content (Love! Hate! Cringe!). The software’s formal constraints place tight limits on our expressiveness, no matter what we’re talking about. > [!highlight]+ Mon Jun 03 2024 14:10:05 GMT-0400 > > content collapse puts all types of information into direct competition > [!highlight]+ Mon Jun 03 2024 14:10:05 GMT-0400 > > content collapse consolidates power over information, and conversation, into the hands of the small number of companies that own the platforms and write the algorithms