Context Collapse Masks a Deeper, More Problematic Factor
July 6, 2020
“From Context Collapse to Content Collapse” appeared in January 2020. The author is the high profile pundit Nicholas Carr. Wikipedia tells me Mr. Carr “originally came to prominence with the 2003 Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn’t Matter.”
The write up was in my files, and I looked it up after someone asked me if technology was changing the human brain. As it turned out, the person with whom I was speaking was an avid consumer of “real” news and information via the Vox publications, a zippy Silicon Valley type of information engine.
The blog post from January 2020 asserted:
Context collapse remains an important conceptual lens, but what’s becoming clear now is that a very different kind of collapse — content collapse — will be the more consequential legacy of social media. Content collapse, as I define it, is the 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.
I agree. However, I think there is an importance aspect of digital information which is — forgive me, please — presented without context.
Specifically, when digital information flows, it operates in a manner akin to sand in a sandstorm. The abrasive nature of sand erodes and in some cases blasts surfaces. In other cases, a sandstorm in Saudi Arabia can lower the air quality in rural Kentucky.
The points, which are important to my work, are:
- Digital information is inherently corrosive; that is, digital information flows do not “build up”; digital information flows wear down. That’s where the Carr phrasing kicks in. The loss of context is a consequence of the nature of digital information flows.
- Content is not necessary for digital information to act as an abrasive. The Googley phrase “data exhaust” may be as or in some cases more important than the Instagram posts or TikTok videos. The “exhaust” provides the raw material for information manipulation, disinformation, misinformation, etc.
- Eroded structures can change their form and function. They can fall down like the collapse of the middle managers in an “informationized” organization. They can themselves become abrasive particles, a distinction I like to make when thinking about Facebook’s founder comments, the data Facebook gathers, and the behaviors regarding access to Facebook data.
For the now long gone US Office of Technology Assessment, I wrote “The Information Factory.” That monograph looked at Japan’s ambitious plans to become a leader in computing, databases, and other nifty technologies. I think we did the research in the early 1990s.
The point is that in the course of that research, the Japanese thinkers coined some words that I found more useful than some of the Japanese information investments; for instance:
Informationize. This words was used by MITI thinkers to describe what today is called “going digital” when a company uses new information technology to make a business more efficient.
Making the abstract noun “information” into a verb “to informationize” captured a mental mind set as well as the technical processes required to achieve the goal.
Mr. Carr’s insight and the question I was asked illustrate that it has taken more than 30 years to come to grips with the deeper implications of the “digital revolution.”
Collapse and loss of context are the visible consequences of flowing digital information. The underlying factor is, therefore, easily overlooked.
That underlying factor means that the train has left the station, and it if and when it returns, it will be changed in fundamental ways.
All aboard for the new normal. When the train pulls in if it ever does, the arrival will spark many TikTok videos.
Stephen E Arnold, July 6, 2020
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