Everything Is Context Collapse
Huh.. Maybe living on the internet had unforeseen consequences?
Hey there IRL friends, internet friends and strangers coming across this newsletter,
It’s great to see you. The last newsletter was a few weeks ago. I’m happy to be back.
So first things first. Regular readers might notice that the newsletter name has changed. “Neal Ungerleider Newsletter” is great and succinct and it’ll never get more succinct than that, but it’s also a little plain. If I was still working in journalism with regular bylines I’d probably be more into that name, but one of consulting’s many differences (you make way more money! the work is less stressful! you’re not in an industry in constant austerity mode!) is that you’re not in the public eye as much. I won’t mention any horrible LinkedIn LARPing words like “personal brand” or anything like that, but yup… it was the right time for a change.
With that said, let’s talk context collapse.
Here’s the context: I was brainstorming names for this newsletter and doing all the marketing-y things you do with branding: Building lists with love/hate/meh columns, doing web searches for the name, measuring SEO for it, making mock logos, blah blah blah. Then I came across the first issue of journalist Charlie Warzel’s new newsletter, which you should really read, and was funnily enough about an academic concept called “context collapse.”
Basically, on the internet, very different audiences live in the same space. Let’s imagine you have a Facebook feed. You post on Facebook every few days; sometimes a serious post, sometimes a funny meme, sometimes dogs with zoomies.
Who’s the audience for your Facebook posts? Let’s imagine that you didn’t friend your boss out of common sense but apart from that, it’s wide open. You remembered to set your privacy settings to friends-only instead of public, but apart from that?
You post that funny dog with the zoomies video I just posted above. Your IRL friends see it. So do your parents. So do the people you went to high school with (because we never say goodbye to friends on Facebook, just smell you later), your third cousin you met once at the family reunion, your coworkers from that summer job that one year and your neighbors from before you moved.
That’s a whole lot of different audiences to be talking to at once who might not have a whole lot in common!
I certainly wouldn’t share that meme that I shared with my horror movie fan Facebook group with my elderly relatives! Maybe I want to share vacation pictures with my elderly relatives but not the creepy dude from high school! Social media—and the internet in general—flattens context into one big flat pancake, consequences be damned.
And what happens when you’re talking not just to a relatively closed community of contacts on Facebook but blasting to the whole damned public on Twitter and Instagram? And what happens when the medium alters your message? I’ll quote Warzel here:
A piece of information intended for one audience finds its way to another — usually an uncharitable one — which then reads said information in the worst possible faith.
In other words, the modern internet really sucks at putting information in context.
Context collapse—and a lot of other topics related to communication—deeply interest me. I work in advertising and marketing, I used to work in journalism, and I sincerely believe that the internet is the biggest change driver to mass communications since Gutenberg created the printing press. Furthermore, I believe that we’re in an era where the internet and related mass communications like social media, streaming media, continual advertising surveillance and immersive gaming are changing society on a deep and profound basis that won’t become apparent for decades.
A lot of journalists are great at writing about journalism, but not about other mass communications. Advertisers and marketers know their craft well, but can be siloed sometimes. Academics are great at synthesizing data, but aren’t in the field day to day. I think there’s room for someone with experience in all those worlds to talk about mass communications. So let’s do this damned thing.
Also… second jab finished last week! Here’s to a return to people doing things outside the house again, to talking in person instead of over video chat, to eating mediocre office lunch, to working in coffee shops, to meeting friends in crowded bars, to (and I really miss this one) seeing bands play live. Here’s to everyone who wants or needs a vaccine getting one worldwide, and putting this damned pandemic in the past.
Things I’ve Enjoyed Lately:
This one’s a few months old, but a good look at the culture wars inside the New York Times.
Ex-USA Today tech reporter Jefferson Graham has a great new TV show on Tubi.
Learning how Block Club Chicago juggled competing priorities in a horrible situation when deciding whether to publish video of a police officer killing a 13-year-old.
Reading about how Duolingo launched in Yiddish.
Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky on how the brain influences religious belief, and vice versa.
I hope you enjoyed this newsletter and found it useful. Talk soon.
Best,
Neal