context flourishing

[kradeelav]

i've been reading voraciously again; complex, controversial nuanced books. feels good.

it's been making me think about the "context collapse" of discussions online versus the "context flourishing" that i feel like books naturally inhabit. was talking with the muse last night - he coined 'context flourishing'.

-> online - sometimes all you see is a throw-away tweet where half of the discussion may have been in private. or alluded to. or unspoken in the person's social group/social bubble of choice. even if it's a fairly educational thread, it is simply impossible to fit anything more in the sheer space, much less with the defensive way people write public thoughts now - most tweets/short form text are made with some kind of urgent or emotional impetuous - something we all know is absolutely dreadful for nuance. dreamwidth/blog-length essays are slightly better but even essays (even with links) can't capture all of one person's thoughts on a social movement.

-> in books - most timeless books anyway - the author doesn't assume the reader's knowledge. you typically get a more lengthy history to ease yourself in. clarifications; the author and editor have had a chance to sit and review the text of the book from start to finish and ponder if there's something the reader might misinterpret. how something that might be mentioned in the beginning would be referenced at the end. dedicated chapters to squirrley chapters or long winded tangents than just a footnote.

like planting a plant knowingly in an oversized pot - there's more space for the topic to grow into as needed.

an example of context collapse recently that i can't stop thinking about is when a bunch of people on bsky mistakenly thought an .ai file (adobe illustrator, a file type that has existed for twenty years, is an industry standard, and easily googleable) somehow meant "ai" in the artificial intelligence sense... and doubled down on it. honest mistakes are one thing, but the doubling down (probably because it made them feel embarrassed) is the troubling part.

it feels linked to the above thought in a subtle way - where these kinds of mistakes are so much more common because there's no room for these kinds of gentle, patient explanations - whether emotional or physical room.

Comments

[verpine]

Something about calling it 'context collapse' blew my mind. Not to keep griping about tumblr in your comments, but you phrased extremely well a huge reason why I'm just finding social media existence more and more exhausting lately.

[kradeelav]

haha all good - it takes a while to detox from SM. :) been right there for a few years and it really is nuts as to the difference in mental sensations. very much a 'hard to notice one's a crab in a bucket' vibes.

the good news is the old web -like dreamwidth- is still out three, just takes significant patience to find the pockets that speaks to ya.

[verpine]

Crab bucket vibes for real lol, I didn't notice until I made a DW account and was immediately like 'wow this ISN'T hurting my brain.' Stumbled across DW totally by accident too. Tumblr still seems like a decent way to post fanart- unless you have a different site you think is better for fanart?

[kradeelav]

so wish i had a better site in mind for you ... tumblr's the last of the old guard that's actually fun to post on, and while i post strictly art on bsky and the fediverse just so it has some eyes i can't really wholesale recommend them. hopefully something else pops up though!

[verpine]

Oh that's okay, thanks! Guess I'll consider bsky. Tumblr's mature content filter seems to be freaking out and blocking a lot of random stuff now, so maybe everybody worried about the site going down aren't totally overreacting. Which is a shame, despite its flaws it's kind of ideal for fanart imo

[(Anonymous)]

I think there is maybe a defensiveness that emerges in online writing where we don't want to assume that our contributions will be read by a large audience, so we're reluctant to provide context because it would seem somehow hubristic to be like "you, the reader, are out there, and you clearly don't know about this topic as much as I do, and I'm going to educate you about it". Meanwhile books are of course written with the expectation of being read by people outside the writer's personal circle. I think it's a tricky one to navigate: I always operate on the principle of "assume nobody reads your blog/shortform thoughts" and for that reason I make reference to things that I know other people won't understand, with no explanation.

[kradeelav]

that's actually a really good point; i hadn't thought of it like that. but dreamwidth is a great example where the vast majority of journal posts are written to friends and a looser wing of acquaintances and certinally never expected to branch out beyond "fandom" as a whole. taking a tone that might read as arrogant would feel to be in poor taste if not just strange (and frankly long-winded; imagine trying to explain basic fandom terms to a grandma in a simple happy post about a current tv episode)

thanks for writing! :)

[paperghost]

When I started reading again for a bit years ago and last year, I was hit with a dissonance how online discussions don't ever cover the depth books about complex topics do. It's both the lack of context and how public (or even private) online discussions feel like you're put in a performance spot with a crowd to please, or you can be interrupted at any moment with a bad faith counterpoint.

[kradeelav]

nodding so much!! even if i strongly disagree with a book, to your point - there's at least so much more emotional and textual room allowed to the topic than 'here's a thought, send tweet-'.

i can't help but think the sheer pressure to create more engagement/numbers passively plays into this as well; the types of things one would say to get people to click 'like' (*just* controversial to annoy them, not so controversial for them to hit unfollow) is very different than laying out the thoughts in a book...