
From context collapse to content collapse - MindGods
http://www.roughtype.com/?p=8724
======
burlesona
Great article. The author concludes with the following points on what is
happening to information as all information is increasingly "flattened" to fit
the new, single content stream of the social media feeds on our smartphones:

1\. Everything is trivialized: major public policy changes arrive in the same
package and placed next to trivial pop culture.

2\. We respond to information using the same low-bandwidth tools (like, heart,
retweet, etc.) that limit the expressiveness of response.

3\. All information is in direct competition, playing the algorithms to gain
attention.

4\. Power over information is consolidated to a very small number of
gatekeepers, and mainly Facebook.

This is an interesting way to look at things, and it resonates with me. I
think the author described the problems with what I think of as the
"hypermedia" era very well. But the author doesn't offer suggestions for what,
if anything we should do about it.

As for myself, a couple years ago I read Cal Newport's Deep Work and then
Digital Minimalism, and found their ideas compelling enough that I deleted
Facebook and disabled web browsing and email on my phone (although I later put
web and email back).

However, #deletefacebook seems to have about a snowballs chance of happening
at large.

What countering forces could or should break the deathgrip that Facebook and
Google in particular hold over communication and information publication
today?

~~~
op03
He missed an important piece - it all functions because the Reward circuitry
in peoples brains are feeding off of Likes/Clicks/View/Upvote counts etc etc.

Take the dumb counts away. Hide them. Delay them etc etc and all of a sudden
pavlovs dog or skinners rat starts behaving differently.

People act as if this dumb half baked reward system solely existing to
increase "engagement" underlying everything is now unchangeable and baked into
the fabric of everything for ever and always.

They are wrong.

~~~
joe_the_user
There are quite possibly better ways to run reactions than the way current
social media does it.

However, I think it's easy to miss the important role/use that these devices
play. The article "the silence is deafening" just the other day noted how non-
verbal cues in conversation and I'd add that social media reactions and
similar devices allows people to be "loosely engaged" with each other in the
way that who attend the same event without exchanging words are loosely
connected.

And these kinds of perfunctory attachments are important (as COVID also
shows). These kinds of attachment were also manipulated even before the
Internet, with store clerks instructed to say "have a nice day" and such even
in the 1970s.

Which is to say, likes, memes and emoticons may seem kinda silly and annoying
from one perspective but they're a way to emulate "the stuff of life" and we
need to think about how to do that better.

------
svantana
As a musician, I'm sad to see that social media are almost exclusively visual.
Very few browse their feeds with sound on, videos have subtitles, and any
audio content needs a big "SOUND ON" banner to even have a chance of being
heard. Music streaming services have all but sunsetted their (admittedly lame)
social features and focus on their "1-click mood/activity-based background
music" experience. Music fans are relegated to toxic echo chambers like
reddit.

I recently heard someone say "music was central to youth culture from 1965 to
2005, but that is no longer the case". I can't help but think it has to do
with the 'social media on smartphones' experience, the medium is the message
and so forth.

~~~
pjc50
The music industry have undoubtedly contributed to that. You can't put music
in video content without risking takedowns. Or have it in a stream. You're not
_allowed_ to have a music culture in fixed recordings.

(I'm a long way from youth culture myself, but I get the impression that what
we have now is not "culture" but "cultures"; rather than a single convenient
for historians "scene" per time period, all sorts of scenes exist at once. You
can't tell me that kpop stans aren't a global youth culture, posting their
fancams all over the place. Now wondering if that contradicts what I said
above..)

~~~
AndrewUnmuted
The music industry's culpability in this is even greater than their absurdly
litigious approach to intellectual property.

Consider how music videos came to be, in a world where the music industry was
struggling to stay relevant in an era of CGI-laden PG-13 Hollywood cinema,
arcades, home video, and cable television. Music videos were a way for the
music industry to get in on the advertisement and product placement action,
from which all the other forms of media were able to profit.

Now that most valuable music today has a very strong brand identity, targeted
demographics, a tried-and-true promotional formula, and many times even a
full-on music video to go with it, the industry perceives it as a true risk
for someone to hear a song and not see the "approved" visuals to go along with
that song.

------
gumby
A serious thesis, but I feel one that reflects on a transitional mode.

Just as the all-in-one context collapse spurred a revival of context (unified
FB -> Snapchat/finstas et al), the earlier primitive TV news of the 60s and
70s and RSS feeds of late 99/early 00s rapidly broke into more structured
channels, today using filtering and aggregation — my RSS feed is broken into
synthetic “channels” specifically for this reason. People settle into a mode
they like; “all-in” providers of content become context as well; Fox has an
older demographic reflecting not only comfort with a familiar delivery mode
but also a context.

And the medium-type segregation that Carr describes (newspaper vs magazine vs
LP records) certainly remains: FB is no threat to Netflix or Prime video, much
less vice versa (and see the fox reference above). FB and Twitter May have
killed the short blog post but hardly the long ones.

This is straight McLuhan.

------
kumarvvr
A subset of the authors point is the "truth collapse".

It's increasingly difficult to differentiate truth from falsehood. Also
increasingly difficult to differentiate between truth and 'almost' truth.

A further problem, likely in the future will be 'source collapse'.

It will be increasingly difficult to determine the actual source of news, with
unlimited sharing and distribution. Add in to this mix of chaos AI generated
news articles, it may well be possible that people will shun internet news
altogether.

~~~
heavenlyblue
You could simply use cryptography to sign all messages sent by sources.
Problem solved.

~~~
kumarvvr
That will not solve the problem to the average user.

Also, even if all sources are verified, it is already very trivial to create a
new publication or a "news" source and make it look legitimate in a few
months.

It's a very messed up situation.

~~~
082349872349872
Agreed on the modal user, but two quibbles: (a) how often does anyone follow
secondary sources that are only a few months old? (b) it is less trivial to
create new primary sources. (not that publishers are in the habit of giving
easily followed references)

------
the_snooze
> Zuckerberg praised context collapse as a force for moral cleanliness:
> “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

What a twisted view of humanity. No wonder people joke the guy is a robot.

~~~
joshuaissac
Zuckerberg's approach might actually work if people were universally
accepting, but it does not match up with reality as it is, where behaviour
that is acceptable in one culture/subculture might get you ostracised, shunned
or even killed in another.

I have read posts on Facebook help pages from people who have had to deal with
the consequences of Facebook forcibly breaking down the walls between a
person's mutually exclusive cliques, e.g. a girl complaining that hijab-less
photos of her posted and tagged by her friends were appearing on the Facebook
feed of her conservative Islamic family members (the pre-approval option for
tagging only controls whether it appears on your Wall; posts you are tagged in
can still appear on your friends' feed even they are not directly friends with
the poster).

I have always wondered why Facebook designed it this way, or why they did not
fix it, since they already know all about your cliques. Zuckerberg's comment
suggests that they had almost an ideological reason for it.

~~~
coffeefirst
The other example that comes up a lot is people who are gay and haven't come
out to their families/hometowns yet.

But look, I don't have a complicated social life, and I still can't fathom
this idea that you share the exact same same stuff with all friends/co-
workers/family/acquaintances.

There are some people I talk about politics to and some I don't, some people I
talk to about music or books and some I don't, some people I talk to about
technology and MANY I never would.

So Facebook became the lowest common denominator of what I was willing to
share: my dog. He's a good boy.

Anyway my feed withered down to everyone's lowest common denominator (pets,
travel photos, some children, often just nothing) and a few vocal armchair
activists do didn't get the memo. Which in some ways is great, it's so boring
I can just deactivate my account on a whim.

------
awake
> Now all information belongs to a single category, and it all pours through a
> single channel.

It may not be relevant to the article but I think context collapse is a good
way of describing the issues with online meetings. In a conference room you
can sit next to people who share your interests or who you feel comfortable
with. You may whisper in someone's ear about something that is relevant to the
current discussion. You can direct your attention at someone by physically
turning towards them and use the volume of your voice and body language to
control who is consuming your vocal and physical channels of information.

That is just to say the problem that information channels are being condensed
is not limited to social media. I think a lot of the points from the article
about information competitiveness and trivialization can apply to other areas
where information channels are collapsing. Also let me know if you can think
of any other examples.

------
DanielBMarkham
Great essay. This guy nails it, although I think his scholarly approach misses
some key ramifications. (I'm also not sure I like "content collapse", since
there's nothing unusual happening here, just everything all at once, but
that's a fight for another day)

I've been kicking around this problem since 2009 and I keep getting back to
different physical devices for different social contexts. It's not just that
the contexts are different; it's that we need to use our bodies to show
ourselves and others that we are moving into some different context. Otherwise
the "programming" doesn't work.

The fundamental error here is thinking that all human communication can
collapse to data. That's wrong in a ton of ways, but the idea has a helluva
powerful following among us nerd.

Cool stuff. Thanks.

~~~
thyrsus
I think you are right about distinct devices. I use a phone and computers
owned by my employer for professional activities, and a different phone and
personally owned computers for my private interests. There is, of course,
uncomfortable bleeding between the two, e.g., health insurance e-mails going
to my empolyee account that gets forwarded to my private e-mail account. Just
part of the insanity of employer based health care.

------
DangitBobby
> 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.

I find the criticism of Zuckerberg here to completely unwarranted. Zuckerberg
is completely correct, and he is not making a category _error_. In fact
"yoking together in an obscene comparison two events of radically different
scale and import" is precisely what allows Zuckerberg's point to be so
salient. I'm unsure how the author could come to the conclusion that Z, the
one who originally clearly demonstrated this point, somehow did not understand
it as he was making it.

------
bhntr3
So the context collapse of early social media ultimately led to context
restoration. Why does the author never propose that content collapse might
lead to content restoration? After all, I'm choosing to consume this content
through the lens of hacker news for a reason.

------
gz5
Great article.

Infinite content being firehosed to a content consumption bandwidth
constrained population (still 24 hours in a day).

The whole consumption model changes - most folks end up drinking from the
firehose by very lightly skimming an incredible width of content (even those
it is narrow in sense that it is within the confines of the social network
algorithms), while never deeply engaging, and rarely going outside their sweet
spot.

Then the consumption model changes the supply side. And we loop. What breaks
this loop?

~~~
numpad0
Finite nature of VC investments! Twitter used to have UserStream, basically
free Firehose, but the water level hit the floor and they shut it down.

~~~
gz5
Good point. And $ focused on exponential growth communities consuming content
paid for by the attention of the content consumers. Rather than $ focused on
long tail communities and deeper, more expensive, more difficult to monetize
(per unit cost) content.

------
kevinstubbs
Interestingly, content collapse was one of the most salient ideas I took away
from reading Fahrenheit 451. Of course, the book took it to an extreme that
will never become a reality.. Social media may be incentivized to keep their
users within the system and feed them short headlines that satisfy their
question of "what's going on in the world today" via content collapse. But I
don't see this spreading to all forms of content on the internet/devices.
Online publishers, digital advertisers, brands, and even Google rely on medium
to longform content for their business models. Caveats abound, but from my
perspective, the internet runs on articles.

"Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read
all the classics; keep up with your neighbords."

\- Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451

------
dmje
Superb piece. The ideas are pretty great but what really stands out is that
the guy can write, beautifully. So often people have great ideas but little
ability to express them, so it's nice when both happen at once..

------
mostlysimilar
To an extent I think the web provides separate contexts for information. I go
to certain websites to find news and others to find entertainment. I'm
intentional about it. For aggregator sites like Reddit, separate feeds
(multireddits) are possible if you spend an extra 10 minutes to configure
them.

Most social media makes it easy for people to land in one place and use that
as a funnel for consuming all of their information, and provides no tools for
curation. True as ever, the majority of people find the lowest friction way
forward. We have the tools to empower people to be careful and intentional,
but only a small subset of the population actually use them. That's a
behavioral issue amplified by technology, and well beyond my ability to
diagnose.

I wonder about the desire to consume information wrapped up in a social
context. How much of sharing an article is actually about sharing information,
and how much is about presenting an identity associated with that content?
When everything is your social media feed, everything is on some level about
building your identity.

I want there to be technological answers to these problems, but the older I
get and the longer I work with technology, the less answers I find.

------
ipi
well this is one amazing article. The author just earned my mad respect. Just
bumped up his book on my read list. I find it interesting to find out how the
entire system is shaping up.

------
xtiansimon
> "When social media was taking shape fifteen-odd years ago..."

Maybe 5-10 years before that, if you didn't get your news from a newspaper,
radio or television, then you could blissfully ignore the news. Now, because
the mobile phone is small, convenient, and fun to swipe (now with more yummy
haptic goodness), you can get "your news" between the alarm clock and
breakfast while on the toilet.

This article disturbs me. If there is a crisis here it's growing up thinking
what comes packaged with your friends birthday pics, selfies of your new do
and cat picture of the day is a platform for news. [1]

Why is 'content collapse' not just post-hoc rationalization of the evolution
of social media as a toy experience for connecting with friends to media
outlet? Because the latter makes the former into a great place for businesses
to place targeted ads within a local community [2].

Besides, I just plunked down >$500 for my new phone, and I have a >1hr commute
to work--Oh wait! That was before The Thing. Now I'm baking bread, trying to
keep from getting distracted working from home, and spending time with my
family. hehe

[1]: In a recent interview with John Stewart about his new film on politics,
David Green asks, "I look back to "The Daily Show." And I, as a journalist,
just remember being like, this is someone showing that people can get their
news in an entertaining way."

Stewart. "I'm not sure. I mean, I never thought that we were delivering the
news, I guess. So maybe I'm not quite - I think we were delivering criticism
of it. [...] The thing that we were doing has generally been around forever,
which is making fun of the powers that be and the news of the day in a
satirical fashion."

[https://www.npr.org/2020/06/25/883233441/jon-stewarts-new-
fi...](https://www.npr.org/2020/06/25/883233441/jon-stewarts-new-film-is-
about-whats-gone-wrong-with-american-politics)

[2]: As recent FB ad boycott makes clear, Who can afford TV ads?

------
verdverm
This is a great perspective. I wonder if the news orgs contributed to their
own collapse by pushing too many obtrusive ads. Did people start to prefer FB
where they figured out how to places ads with higher returns? They might be
better at it simple because they can target better too. News as example,
content collapse generally.

------
inetknght
This gets served from a self-signed certificate and returns a 404 site not
found.

Given that there's other comments about the blog post ... what happened here?

~~~
numpad0
Use plain HTTP.

------
numpad0
At least for the first part, article mentions an Instagram feature to separate
contexts without splitting accounts but do people not do that all the time
anywhere, feature exists or allowed or not?

I don’t know how many such Facebook accounts exist but I’ve heard about dummy
public facing accounts to play a boring person.

------
cdaringe
I get the desire to convey the significance and nuance of the issues
described, but the usage of collapse felt out-of-place. Something like fold,
reduction, consolidation, or even condensation would have been more
communicative as a takeaway from the spirit of the article.

------
jraedisch
The last two params are why I like the proposal of Twitter becoming a "dumb"
protocol leaving all filtering to the client.

------
igammarays
I see the "content collapse" as a reversion to the historical norm - for most
of human history, the majority of people were illiterate and uneducated, and
understood little about global affairs. There was a "thinking class" which
included the religious, political, and artistic elite, while everybody else
was part of the "working class" \- effectively peasants who knew little about
the world.

The content collapse threatens to destroy the very foundation of Western
democratic society - an intelligent, educated public that understands nuance
and participates in civic discussion. Instead, it is creating a situation
where the masses are subject to the whims of social media, much like the
peasants of former times, who were often caught up in religious trends and
various mob-like witch hunts.

What is new about our time, is that in democratic societies, the political
elite are no longer part of the "thinking class", by necessity, because they
have to win votes. Only in autocratic societies like China and Russia do the
political elite tend to still speak like an educated elite. It is striking to
note that Vladimir Putin spends a lot of his public time talking about
detailed points in history like specific events of WWII or even medieval
history (see his recent essay on WWII published in the National Interest).
Regardless of whether you agree with his interpretation of history, he often
talks like a professor, not a politician. Politicians in democratic countries,
by contrast, rarely talk about history in nuanced terms because the public is
not interested in "boring" details. The inevitable result is the massive
"dumbing down" of politics that we see in our time, as the political elite
becomes merged with the masses while tech and corporate elites wield the most
power.

~~~
082349872349872
Putin's law school thesis was "The Most Favored Nation Trading Principle in
International Law." Xi's was "Tentative Study of Agricultural Marketization."

(I haven't been able to quickly find Johnson's, but then again the dynamic in
the 1980's _Yes, Minister_ was of LSE-educated politicians seconded by
Oxbridge civil servants. Given a capable cabinet, one might hope a democracy
could elect[1] one of their number with a median formation and still get a
functional[2] government.)

That having been said, the demagogue[3] was a thing even in the ancient world.

[1] on the other hand, what might assigning executive positions at random do
in terms of incentivising education?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition)

[2] as opposed to the conservative view of de Maistre: "Toute nation a le
gouvernement qu'elle mérite." (all countries get the government they deserve)

[3] as one might expect from _δημαγωγός_.

~~~
igammarays
Thank you. I tend to agree with de Maistre. What is striking about Russia (and
Ukraine) is that the general public is far more intellectual than the American
public. Two real stories to illustrate my point: If I walk into a random bar
it's not uncommon for me to hear people talking about Crime and Punishment,
philosophy and history. Even your local fishmonger from Murmansk might strike
up a conversation about events in the Bering Strait in WWII.

------
antonzabirko
It's a good thing. As disgusting as Zuckerberg acts, he happens to be aligned
with the truth here. Presenting different faces for different audiences is
unhealthy for personal growth and self-reflection.

The gatekeeper is not an issue: modulate your social media.

~~~
klyrs
A friend of mine spent a week in jail because her friend posted a picture of
her holding hands with her girlfriend. She had gone home to Saudi Arabia to
visit a dying grandparent, and ended up saying goodbye to her whole family
because it's too unsafe to return.

