Christian unity, Internet, and ‘context collapse’
“The Internet leads to ‘context collapse.’ It places into a space that is intrinsically faceless and lacks geographic borders. That space generalizes language and thought, ignores the very real differences between people and places, and pushes us toward highly generic ways of speaking and thinking.” - 9 Marks
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I’m not persuaded that it’s the Internet that is “generalizing language and thought,” or even that social media do that more than they do the opposite: overparticularizing language and thought.
What the author means by his language on this point isn’t completely clear to me, but it seems obvious now that social media, and the click-hungry algorithms that feed it, reinforce and feed narrow tribalism and the jargon/esoteric language that distinguishes these tribes at least as much as it ‘collapses context.’ But maybe this is mostly the same thing the author is saying a different way.
Also, it’s not just social media that are ‘faceless.’ Books are inherently ‘faceless,’ too … as are epistles, to go back to NT times. The written word is not a fundamentally different thing on a screen vs. on paper. (But screen words are far faster, cheaper, and more quickly forgotten, and that has consequences!)
I don’t want to give the wrong impression, though. There’s a lot of insight in this article. I just think the consequences of social media and web publishing are more mixed.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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