We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste — sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar….
― Henry David Thoreau, Walking
To seek context is to admit that you know nothing, Jon Snow.
Context provides a framework for understanding the meaning and significance of something by considering the surrounding factors that influence its interpretation.
For example, consider the word “bank”. Without context, you can’t know if I’m talking about the place where you keep money or the land alongside of a river. Context is what gives you the necessary information to interpret the word in the same way that I am, so that we can make sure we’re talking about the same thing.
Without proper context, information and situations can be easily misinterpreted and distorted (this is the bulk of how social media is today). When you have a lack of context, intentional or not, communication quickly breaks down, leading to misunderstandings and miscommunications. This lack of context is easy to exploit.
Seeking context is your natural inclination.
And seeking context is to acknowledge that you don’t have the whole story. Understanding things takes time, and you cannot fully understand things without context. A range of elements, including historical, cultural, social, and personal factors shape how we perceive and make sense of information. To gather enough information to see the context in which something exists, requires you to be in control of your own attention.
The longer you focus your attention on something, the more context you see — this is how expertise in something is formed. Because the longer you observe a thing and how it exists with the world around it, the better you understand it. Observing the thing alone isn’t enough; to truly understand something you need to observe the context.
Consider whale poo.
Just by itself, it’s a pretty disgusting thing to consider and, as such, easy to dismiss. But when you look at the context is exists in, you start becoming surprisingly excited. Because whale poo is a key nutrient for the ocean environment.
First, if you are not familiar with whale poop, you should know that it is awesome, visually. Take a moment to picture a pooping whale. A blue whale rises from deep in the Atlantic Ocean, toward the surface, where there will be less pressure working against its bowels. It breaks the water’s skin with a foaming exhale, propels itself forward with its gigantic fluke, and releases from its posterior a neon-hued plume of jello-like excreta. Loose clumps bob to the surface—a treasure.
— Jenny Morber, “Why Whale Poop Matters More Than You Might Think“
Whale poo is rich in iron, which tiny marine plants called phytoplankton eat. Tiny shrimp-like krill eat the phytoplankton. Whales eat the krill, which, in turn, produces yet more whale poo. Research has even shown that whale poo supports more fish and krill than the whales themselves eat.
The “krill paradox” occurs in areas where wales are severely hunted: populations of krill, fish, seals, seabirds and small whales decline even though the are had fewer whales to compete with or eat them, because one of the key elements in the cycle decline (phytoplankton), causing a cascade effect.
Turns out that whale poo helps create the all-important algae that is the source of all marine life and on which life on land is also completely dependant.
To use another whale example of poor context, just look at the names whalers gave sperm whales and their facial anatomy. Physeter catodon or cachalots, are the largest of the toothed whales. Their common name, sperm whales, originated during the heyday of the commercial whaling industry.
The head of the cachalot contains an enormous fluid-filled organ. During whale harvests, this organ, now called the spermaceti organ, was discovered to contain a white liquid that the whalers mistook for the sperm of the whale. Sperm. In the head. Yeah. Tell me an industry is full of men without telling me an industry is full of men.
The oil they harvested from this organ was named spermaceti (from Latin sperma meaning “semen” and ceti meaning “whale”), and it was valued because it could be cooled into a wax that could be made into ointments, cosmetic creams, fine wax candles, pomades, textile finishing products, and industrial lubricants. The whale’s spermaceti organ and blubber also hold sperm oil, a pale yellow oil that was used as a superior lighting oil and later as a lubricant and in soap manufacturing.
Another part of the cachalot is called “the junk” or “the junk melon”. Located below the spermaceti organ, the “junk” consists of compartments of spermaceti separated by cartilage, and is analogous to the melon found in other toothed whales.
Whalers found no use in this part of the whale, and named it simply junk, but today we know better. Cachalots can make the loudest sound of any animal on the planet, and possibly even have a language as complex as our own. The junk melon is thought to be the filter than enables this varied range of vocalisations.
Yet every time you use the cachalot’s common name, you’re repeatedly saying the word sperm, like some kind of twisted way for the patriarchy to make you utter that word. Patriarchal societies have long ascribed superior properties to semen, describing it variously (and ever more hubristically) as life force, substance of the soul, a drop of the brain, divine, equal to ten drops of blood and that which sows the seeds of virtue in the female soul. (Again, tell me an industry is full of men without telling me an industry is full of men.)
Okay, but what does whale poo have to do with social media?
What bothers me most about my experience on social media (TikTok being worst offender because of things like this and this), is the lack of context. I’m inundated in overt and covert messages of increased consumption, my feeds flooded with information that is so far afield it physically hurts my brain to even try and contextualise it all.
My social feeds used to be really bad, but then I got fed up of always feeling so empty, and I began to tightly curate all my social feeds. I tried going on Instagram to grab a selection of what it looks like when I sign in there, but my feeds are mostly full of artists and their art, thinkers and their thoughts. I tried to use my TikTok, but even there cute animal videos, art and thoughtful book reviews dominate my FYP, so I’m going to borrow from Jenny Odell to make this point more clearly.
For example, let’s take a look at my Twitter feed right now. I see the following:
• An article on Al Jazeera by a woman whose cousin was killed at school by ISIL
— Jenny Odell, “How to Do Nothing”
• An article about the Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar last year
• An announcement that @dasharez0ne (a joke account) is selling new T-shirts
• Someone wishing happy birthday to former NASA worker Katherine Johnson
• A video of NBC announcing the death of Senator McCain and shortly afterward cutting to people dressed as dolphins appearing to masturbate onstage
• Photos of Yogi Bear mascot statues dumped in a forest
• A job alert for director of the landscape architecture program at Morgan State University
• A photo of a yet another fire erupting, this time in the Santa Ana Mountains
• Someone’s data visualization of his daughter’s sleeping habits during her first year
• A plug for someone’s upcoming book about the anarchist scene in Chicago
• An Apple ad for Music Lab, starring Florence Welch
For me, this list of examples really helped to drive home the point of how much content gets thrown at us constantly. It’s easy to say that we’re being bombarded with content, but like really big numbers, it’s hard to understand what that really looks like. But in reading that list, I can feel smoke coming out of my ears from simply trying to grasp what it all means (none of those things are linked, so to place them in context you’d have to have a VERY BIG context).
And because there’s no end to this flow of content, I tune out most of it – or in my case, I’ve left most social platforms and use the remaining ones very little, because they instil in me a nebulous existential dread that I don’t want to live with on a daily basis.
Context is what allows you to establish the order of events because context in time and space is the relativity of neighbouring and causal things. Finding context is driven by questions about why something is the way something is, by what happened and why it happened the way it did. Context is what a story relies on to keep readers engaged — a story that exists in a vacuum isn’t a story at all, it’s just a singular event with no meaning beyond itself.
It’s this lack of context, of both time and space, that social media feeds on.
Commenting on the list of headlines and posts in her feed, Odell ponders the meaning of all this information.
Scrolling through the feed, I can’t help but wonder: What am I supposed to think of all this? How am I supposed to think of all this? I imagine different parts of my brain lighting up in a pattern that doesn’t make sense, that forecloses any possible understanding. Many things in there seem important, but the sum total is nonsense, and it produces not understanding but a dull and stupefying dread.
— Jenny Odell, “How to Do Nothing”
The vitriol that permeates all social platforms (and media in general) is where this lack of context is most acutely felt. Shaming and vindictive public opinion rolls over everything and everyone unchecked because the platforms are designed that way. The alt-right bases their success on inattention and knee-jerk reactions that make their messages spread like wildfire. By the time someone tries to showcase the context that’s missing from the messaging, the damage to real people has already been done, and the social storm has moved onto something else; the next, most reaction-inciting thing.
We read headlines, react, and click a button millions of times a day. The hate-filled storms that tear through the social collective is like “watching a flood erode a landscape with no ground-cover plants to slow it down. The natural processes of context and attention are lost.” (Odell, 2014)
Of course, from the point of view of the platforms, this is just good business because the longer you allow a platform to capture your attention, the more money they make, the better their stats look, or the longer they’ve managed to distract you from what’s happening in the real world around you.
Context collapse is what happens when several different audiences flatten into one single context.
If you’ve even been to a wedding, you’ve experienced context collapse. Though, if it was your own wedding, you probably felt it more acutely than your guests. At a wedding, your friends, family, coworkers, and relatives from your spouse’s side (who might be virtual strangers to you) all come together in once place.
You don’t typically speak the same way to each of these groups. Imagine that you just came back from a three-week trip abroad. The story you tell all your social groups is the same, but varies slightly in tone and content depending on who you’re telling it to. Your friends probably get a more adventurous version, your family gets to hear how you so responsibly had so much fun, and maybe your colleagues get to hear how much culture you soaked up while there.
So, let’s get back to the wedding. You’re telling the story of how you and your significant other met. Instead of being able to give a finely tuned version to each social group — the racy version to your friends, the cute romantic version to your family, and the cliff notes version to your coworkers — you have to tell a sanitised version of the story that offends no one, but has also lost its soul.
Context collapse happens when different audiences occupy the same space, and a piece of information intended for one audience finds its way to another, with that new audience’s reaction being uncharitable or very negative because they fail to understand or appreciate the original context.
Before social media, we spoke to different audiences in different ways. But online, with followers in the thousands and millions, it becomes challenging to address your audience as a whole. The typical marketing advice is to speak to your audience rather than at them, and to use an audience avatar to represent your target audience, so they feel like you’re talking to each and every one of them, rather than to a group, but this is easier said than done. Trying to deal with this kind of context collapse leads to social anxiety, less engagement, and eventually leaving the platform, because it’s exhausting to constantly self-monitor and determine how your words, actions and mannerism are perceived in a mixed audience.
“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity,” said no one ever. Except Zuck.
And the only thing I can think of when reading a comment like this is, “Who hurt you, Zuck?”
My grandmother, used to lecture me about my grandfather. Or not so much lecture me as much as wag her finger in the air and say, “That man has a core wound!” at the mere mention of her ex-husband as a way to explain why he was so incapable of meeting people on any terms other than his own.
A core wound is a deep emotional would, most often formed from suppressed pain and emotions that have been internalised from a significant event, typically in childhood. Unless healed, this pain will create a belief system about the self, often leading to compensating behaviours to manage the pain. And Zuckerberg’s mission to make the world a more open and connected place by sacrificing your personal privacy has me wondering what kind of trauma he has suffered to arrive at this conclusion. I personally recoil at the idea of having to always be the same way with everyone all the time, so how does he think this is a good idea?
Context collapse became acute when Facebook rolled out the News Feed and Mini-Feed in 2006. It was a big and controversial addition to the then profile-centric social network. The Mini-Feed section on each member’s profile showed what content he or she had recently added and recent activity elsewhere on the network.
Before, when you left a comment on someone’s Facebook wall, it was more like a physical wall in the sense that others had to go visit that wall to see your comment. We had to be proactive in finding and joining forums, commenting on someone’s MySpace or sending a message on AIM. These direct methods kept us in our walled gardens for the most part.
But in a world with a News Feed, every interaction between users was displayed for all to see. The audience of a small group of friends quickly exploded to include everyone. It’s like hearing the doorbell ring and finding the whole neighbourhood standing there, waiting to come in for a cuppa.
Mark Zuckerberg has a history of speaking his mind on privacy.
And if we’re to understand that he practises what he preaches, we get the honest, unadulterated Zuckerberg experience every time he says something. But what he says is often fraught with problems, ignorance, and arrogance, showcasing his seeming failure to understand the complexity of the issues of privacy (and trust) between users and Facebook.
Given his “information wants to be free” mantra, as if information is akin to a flight of swallows hankering to get back to their migration, it’s not surprising that Zuckerberg proclaimed that it’s social norms on privacy that have changed and that Facebook simply reacts to these shifting norms. Among his missions has been to get people over the “hurdle” of wanting to preserve any privacy online.
Four years ago, when Facebook was just getting started, most people didn’t want to put information about themselves on the Internet. So, we got people through this really big hurdle of getting people to want to put up their full name, a real picture, mobile phone number…and connections to real people.
— Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg had a revelation on vacation that Facebook shouldn’t just be a tool to bring people together, but be “a product that allows you to really feel a person and understand what’s going on with them and feel present with them.… What we’re talking about is the most important and interesting information, which isn’t written down anywhere.… It’s only available if the people choose to share it.” (French, 2008)
Eesh. That’s a level of intimacy that any average person is going to be hesitant to engage in. Yet our performance-fuelled social media spheres push us to share ever more about ourselves, ultimately, to feed the algorithms that feed engagement that make profit. Zuckerberg wants to make the world more open and connected, but the values he operates according to are not clear.
Steve Jobs made technology an art form. Bill Gates wanted to put a computer in every home; now he’s out fighting global poverty. Even though Google faces constant public criticism, its cheesy “Don’t be evil” motto protects it. Sergey Brin and Larry Page have cultivated a public image of themselves as two brilliant technical minds who care about pursuing society’s best interests. So when they overstep, it’s often seen as a well-intentioned mistake.
— Kim-Mai Cutler, “Why Mark Zuckerberg needs to come clean about his views on privacy”
In The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick, Zuckerberg is quoted as saying that “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.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”
This encapsulates the problem with the message Zuckerberg is putting out. There’s a serious lack of context here, and when the individual pieces don’t add up, the only option left is to Sherlock Holmes this sitch and assume that there’s a bigger pattern (context) at play here that isn’t immediately visible, and may only become clear when it’s too late to change it.
Michael Zimmer, privacy and data ethics scholar, writes as follows about this declared lack of integrity: “According to Zuckerberg, the person responsible for the world’s most popular website for sharing information about oneself, wanting to manage your flows of information in such a way that might present a different version of your ‘complete’ self to your friends, family, co-workers, and more distant friends shows a lack of integrity. Really.”
The problem is that, as humans, we’re always managing and restricting the flow of information based on the context we’re in. We have different versions of ourselves for different contexts: you don’t bring your clubbing-persona to lunch with grandma, just like you don’t head to the club when you wanna get into some knitting. You’re still you, but different social contexts allow you to present and explore different aspects of yourself.
This is basic human psychology, a fundamental skill in Getting Along With Other People, and refusing to flex these soft skills in a social setting — instead insisting on a single “pure” version (gee, I wonder where we’ve heard this rhetoric before?) — says a lot about how you see the world. (Tell me you’re a privileged cis-het white man without telling me you’re a privileged cis-het white man.)
But because we’re talking to everyone/everywhere/all the time on social media, rather than a truer “meta” version of ourselves, we end up presenting “a synthesised account that offends no one because it is so bland”. (Odell, 2014) The pinnacle of this is the professional social media star, who is reverse engineered from a formula of what’s the most palatable to everyone, all the time.
Context collapse on social media has flattened the flow of information.
It allows a presidential campaign to carry the same algorithmic weight as funny cat videos. As David Kirkpatrick writes about justifying the News Feed in The Facebook Effect, “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”
On one hand, this levelling of the playing field has been framed as a democratising aspect of social media, treating all content equally allows for a wider range of voices and perspectives to be seen. And it is, indeed, an opportunity for marginalised voices to break through or go around traditional media spaces.
But as this delivery of content has flattened, so has our ability to express ourselves been limited. The “like” button has become the universal response mechanism by which we respond to a vast array of content. When you encounter both a significant political announcement and a heart-warming picture of cats cuddling, you have the same set of response options: to like the content.
The oversimplification of engagement, using a “like” button to respond to vastly different types of content, leads to a lack of nuance in expressing opinions or emotions. Critics argue that important societal discussions or issues might be trivialised when reduced to the same interaction as lighter content.
And then there’s the over-saturation of content, that leads to cognitive overload for us users, making it nearly impossible to prioritise and engage with content in a meaningful way. This contributes to the knee-jerk spread of misinformation, as swathes users don’t take the time to critically evaluate the sources or accuracy of the content they encounter.
Social media is contextual monoculture.
It showcases contextual collapse in full, and it’s just as destructive to the larger context as agricultural monoculture. We all exist in our own little echo chambers, always being fed more of the same unless we actively seek diversity, which isn’t always easy when you don’t know what you’re searching for.
Context collapse is easier to understand in space. For instance, the vast majority of us are so far removed from our sources of food that understanding how and where food is grown, how it’s processed and how it affects the environment around it, it’s a shock to see that context when you’ve never thought past the package you pick up in the supermarket.
Context collapse in time is harder to grasp, but has a more immediate and personal effect. Temporal context collapse creates a permanent instantaneity that dissolves past, present, and future into a constant, amnesiac present.
The order of events, which is essential to understanding anything, is drowned out by a constant alarm that you feel powerless to turn off. The pace at which information moves makes it impossible to keep up — from drama on TikTok that moves so fast that if you blink, you miss it, to songs and artist blowing up with versions of their song they never made themselves.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a wonderful spirit of collaboration on social media, especially TikTok, where other creators can expand on the work of others, creating new avenues for collaboration and ways of creating media that isn’t limited by industry gatekeeping and a lack of investment. TikTok has indeed launched several musicians and authors, but the nature of that fame is even more transient than by conventional means, and you have to be really on point if you want to cash in on it while you’ve got it.
The risk with content moving at this break-neck speed, is that it renders anyone so easily into a mere content mill. And the information overload creates the risk that nothing gets heard. Since all content is “equal” you’re not only competing against presidential campaigns and funny cat videos, you’re also competing against everyone else in your category, in your area, and in the world as well as large-budget advertisers. And as content, and interests as a result, move fast, even large accounts find that they fall off the prime spot on the feed and become relegated to the dusty back shelf, where even their own followers aren’t seeing their content any more.
“Everybody says that there is no censorship on the internet, or at least only in part. But that is not true. Online censorship is applied through the excess of banal content that distracts people from serious or collective issues.”
— Jenny Odell, “How to Do Nothing”
Networks on social media are built on a common reaction emotion.
This as opposed to being built on a shared understanding or passion. These reactions are usually driven by immediate emotional responses, such as amusement, sympathy, agreement, or acknowledgment. Connections formed based on common reaction emotions are often shallow and fleeting, as they are entered around the momentary impact of a post rather than a deep understanding or shared interest.
As an indie author, I’m keenly interested in how other indie creators market their things on social media. I also follow what bigger brands do, but I know the kind of money they can throw at a campaign is far beyond what I can achieve, so I focus on following the ones bootstrapping their marketing together. So far, I’ve learned that the faster you build an audience, the faster it tends to evaporate. Even when you manage to get a decent audience, follow-through is only a fraction of that audience.
Now, we’ve long known in marketing that an aspirational yet eventually achievable conversion rate is about 1%. And that’s high, most people will never even reach that. So, low conversion rates as such don’t surprise me. But the thing that’s been interesting to notice, is that the faster the platform moves, the more strongly it seems to build up a following based on a reaction emotion, TikTok and the platform formerly known as Twitter among the fastest moving. And the more an audience is held together by a reaction emotion alone, the more fickle they are.
Take how you grow and audience for example, a lot of accounts see a sudden spike of growth when they manage to grab onto something in the zeitgeist and make content about it. The social media accounts that blew up during Depp V. Heard are one example. By creating controversial content, an account can see a sudden spike in views and followers, but it can lose them just as quickly when it goes back to posting its usual content.
Context collapse creates a lowest common denominator philosophy of sharing that limits you to topics that are safe for all possible readers/viewers. This is in stark contrast to actors in the field who aren’t afraid to use controversy to drive their own agenda. When the alt-right trolls weaponise this general lack of context, not only is the context completely ignored, but the targeted figures can in themselves become triggers. Then even the mere mention of their name can shut down meaningful conversations online, making it difficult to gather context, even for someone who wants to seek and understand the larger context.
The people physically and actively around you and in your life can see you grow and change in space and time.
They have context. But the nameless, faceless lists of followers in your digital sphere expect and want you to be as monolithic and timeless as a brand is. Coke doesn’t change, and there’s a reason: consistency over time is how you build brands.
But that same permanence is unrealistic for a person. Not being able to change ourselves and change our minds over time is one of the most absurd aspects of social media culture. To grow and change our opinions when we gain broader context, even about really big things, is natural and even desirable. Would you want to be friends with someone who never changed their mind about anything? Never grew as a person?
On social media, if you dare to deviate from the one content bucket you went viral in, people will loudly voice their disappointment in you. As a result of this, we’re also getting worse at empathy and forgiveness, feeding into that hateful culture that is so prevalent on social platforms. And this short-cycle dopamine-focus, this transient way of interacting with each other on socials like TikTok, is extending to how we behave with others more broadly.
Time and again, I’ve met people through online channels, only to have them disappear into the ether as quickly as they came. It seems that when the energy of that shared reaction emotion wears out, so does the relationship. In most cases, you can even see it coming from afar, when people only engage with you to hear themselves talk, you’re only useful to them when they want something.
But openings for meaningful, thought-provoking conversation are often simply ignored. Or almost worse, begun without a second thought and then turned vitriolic when the person is faced with the discussions causing unpleasant or negative emotions, and rather than deal with their own feelings — direct their focus for long enough to gain a large enough context to genuinely learn something — they lash out and make a hasty retreat into radio silence.
The loss of context is also the loss of good communication.
As many books that have been written about how to become a better conversationalist and as many free articles as there are about the value of transformational relationships and how to build them, you’d think that we collectively would have become excellent communicators. But it seems we’ve only become worse communicators. As we prefer to text more, we have higher quantity of interactions, but they’re poorer in quality.
This has a lot to do with how we communicate via text, as it encourages laziness and passive-aggressive behaviour. Typing on a screen invites impulsive responses resulting in toxic drive-by messages. When you don’t have to take a breath to speak, don’t risk being interrupted, don’t see the body language and facial expression of the person you’re hurting, it’s easy to be callous, mean or angry. But what can be a chance to clear the air for one person, ends up being overwhelming for the recipient.
It’s just too easy. Delayed on your way to a meeting, you text, ‘sorry running late.’ You leave for work in the morning after a fight with your partner and spend the train ride typing a monologue of hurt and anger. You get a second invitation for Saturday night, so you text the person you originally made plans with: ‘Apologies, not feeling well, need to cancel.’
— Maggie Mulqueen, “Texting really is ruining personal relationships”
The language we use has an impact on our ability to communicate. One study by Joan Lee, designed to understand the effect of text messaging on language, found that “students who reported texting more rejected more words instead of acknowledging them as possible words.” (Lee, 2012)
Lee suggests that reading traditional print media exposes people to variety and creativity in language that is not found in the colloquial peer-to-peer text messaging used among youth or ‘generation text’. She says reading encourages flexibility in language use and tolerance of different words. It helps readers to develop skills that allow them to generate interpretable readings of new or unusual words. Texting, on the other hand, is associated with rigid linguistic constraints which caused students to reject many of the words in the study.
So, not only does texting encourage a decreased vocabulary, it also creates a reluctance to learn new words. This in turn, leads to an increased risk of misunderstandings and a risk of poorly communicating your own message as you lack the words to accurately express yourself.
I’m going to argue that with this propensity for the efficient use of words, there’s a lot of context being left out of our communication. When messages read more like random thoughts, it’s up to the recipient to do the extra cognitive labour if they want to understand what the sender is trying to communicate. But have we really come this far only to come this far? We already know that women shoulder the brunt of the mental load in a household, and by being poor communicators, we’re only asking them to do even more.
Yet again, the changes that technology has enabled, mainly serve those who already have money and power by exploiting the rest of us.
Social media feels more like the trading floor at the stock exchange, information flying in every direction, demanding split-second decisions and providing short-cycle dopamine hits, than it does real life. It’s in stark contrast to places like libraries, museums, parks and natural areas, which allow for slow browsing and close attention. They are pockets in space and time where you allow yourself to slow down and open up your senses, your curiosity. You wander the spaces searching, learning and expanding your context.
You exist in context.
In your social feed, “these aspects of information — provenance, trustworthiness, or what the hell it’s even about — are neither internally coherent nor subject to my judgement. Instead, this information throws itself at me in no particular order, autoplaying videos and grabbing me with headlines, and behind the scenes, it’s me who’s being researched.” (Odell, 2014)
So, as we spend more time in our digital personas, or as our True Selves if Zuckerberg is to be believed, we need to understand the sociology involved with using social media. Because the difference between experiencing context collapse at your wedding and on social platforms, is that when the wedding is over, so is the context collapse and everyone goes back to the separate social groups they belong in.
Will you love me when my phone turns off? I don't want to be some digital Jesus No more followers, we'll both get lost When it's me and you inside real life — Jon Bellion, "Conversations with my Wife"
