• Nicholas Carr argues that {1.2a2} context collapse is no longer “the story” of social media.
  • People have largely started moving away from sharing personal content in favor of aggregating or curating through sharing other people’s posts (e.g, news stories, photos, tweets, etc)[^1].
  • They’ve also started moving away from highly public platforms to more private spaces — the cozyweb is a tool of context restoration.
• Instead, he says content collapse is a more pressing issue — or the more “consequential legacy” of social media.
  • Content collapse refers to the flattening of different types and categories of information. Personal posts, news, entertainment, art, education, marketing, opinion pieces, etc. are all treated as the same type of information, and we have to respond to all of it using the same set of limited tools.
• This reminds me of a broderick, ryan newsletter a while ago where he discussed the collapse of broader media apparatuses:

  Back in 2018, even with Trump in the White House, we still had a hybrid media environment where still-somewhat-healthy digital publishers, still-somewhat-searchable social networks, and fairly-large national news organizations all competed inside the attention economy…. if something inside of one of those pipelines diverged too much from the others, you could tell simply by consulting the others. Now that this information apparatus, as Tani concludes, is collapsing, you can’t figure out what’s important because, in a sense, nothing is.[^2]

• (Also reminds me of not all media should be digital media — are we also collapsing content types, not just categories? most of the internet is noise)
• Everything is trivialized, we don’t have effective reference points to determine the legitimacy of information we come across, everything on our feeds is now in direct competition, and this consolidates “power over information, and conversation, into the hands of the small number of companies that own the platforms and write the algorithms”.
• Carr, Nicholas - 2020 - From context collapse to content collapse:
  • [UNABLE TO LOCATE EMBED]
• they want videos to feel like a friend with perfect media training casually facetiming them from a professional newsroom

[^1]: Context collapse and context restoration | ROUGH TYPE [^2]: When nothing is important everything is (garbageday.email)