12 ms·
From context collapse to content collapse
- ipi 6y agowell 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.
- the_snooze 6y ago> 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.
- aspenmayer 6y agoAre identity minimalists (Zuckerberg, Facebook) mistaking the is of legal personhood, and its one-to-one mapping to individual humans in real life, for their own ought, which presupposes that virtual identities should also map to named individuals in real life? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
- klyrs 6y agoRelated, our legal rights in this area are quickly eroding https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/flr/vol68/iss2/6/ https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/flr/vol68/iss2/6/
- S_A_P 6y agoAgree- people can be complex. I would also argue that having multiple identities could be a sign of integrity. Assuming that you are acting in good faith, it may be good to try ideas under a hidden/separate identity. Having the freedom to make mistakes and not worry about your permanent record following you can help you grow. Or, maybe you live in a country with a government that doesn’t take criticism well(for that matter recent news has proven that some companies don’t either). Is it a sign of integrity to not spread what could be legitimate criticism? Whistleblowers?
- naringas 6y agowhat's he gonna say next? that people should have logically consistent beliefs? hahah....
- joshuaissac 6y agoZuckerberg'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.
- naasking 6y agoThe cynic side of me says that the motives are actually financial. If you exhibit contradictory interests in the data Facebook gathers on you for its advertisers, then that data might be less valuable.
- ssivark 6y agoThe ostensible reason was ideological, but the underlying reason might well be an attempt to boost “engagement” and assert greater power over users (which could then be milked in various ways, eg: targeted messaging and selective sharing)
- numpad0 6y agoFacebook’s original purpose was to build a catalog of girls to pick from in the uni dorm. So it’s all centered around the real name and face, I guess they haven’t pivoted from there.
- coffeefirst 6y agoThe 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.
- _Microft 6y ago"I've talked to Mark about integrity. His understanding of the subject is limited." - Fake Quote, 2020 I think it's rather that we have one identity and different aspects of this identity show when interacting with different people (think: projection of a higher-dimensional object onto a lower-dimensional screen).
- jerf 6y agoThat is exactly how I think about it. I'm not lying to anybody in my presentation to them, but I do choose which aspects to present. They are true aspects, but I don't blast young kids with my interests in number theory, my children with my interests in the philosophy of communication ethics, HN with what funny thing happened to my dog last night, my parents with the details of how I'm designing a subsystem at work, my wife with the foreign language I'm studying... because what would be the point of that? The amount that I'm really trying to hide from somebody is fairly small for me... your mileage may legitimately vary for any number of reasons... but selectivity is still necessary to function. Even if I were perfectly content with absolutely everybody in my life seeing a total stream of everything, none of them would want it. This is primarily what made it so I never got on Facebook, and for most of Facebook's life, what kept me off of it. Now you couldn't pay me enough to get on it for other reasons, but those are more recent. This is the ur-reason. I already had multiple online personas and no interest in collapsing them.
- zxcmx 6y agoMaybe, although I've noticed that the group I'm in can influence my thinking and reactions. I think it's possible a group can form a sort of "exoself" and allow you to believe and perceive different things than you usually might. Not a sociologist, just anecdata. I suppose you could still consider this a lensing effect (aka your whole self includes this subset) but I'm tempted to see the group as a sort of extension or prosthesis.
- S_A_P 6y agoalternate take: The integrity of our ad revenue model and data collection works best with everyone having exactly 1 identity...
- bradd 6y agoReally? Is Mark Zuckerberg a robot? Wow!
- jes5199 6y agoI wonder what about Zuckerberg, a wealthy white man who went to an expensive school, makes him think that this is a good idea
- catalogia 6y agoZuckerberg doesn't walk the talk, he keeps his personal life rather private. He says the shit he says because he thinks it would be profitable if people behave the way he says they should.
- roughly 6y agoThis is why actual honest-to-god diversity matters in tech. Anyone from any background except Wealthy White Stanford Grad could tell you immediately what was wrong with that sentence. Zuckerberg runs a company whose policies affect roughly a third of the planet by population - there's a moral obligation to be better than this.
- satyrnein 6y agoMeanwhile his profile is carefully curated by a team of people.
- stiglitz 6y agoThe word "integrity" has a positive connotation, but it doesn't simply mean "goodness". It also means consistency. In that sense, it makes sense to call the way we act differently in front of different audiences a "lack of integrity". So, I agree the statement is a bit robotic (specifically because it points out a natural part of human behavior as a character flaw), but not that it's twisted.
- awake 6y ago> 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.
- verdverm 6y agoThis 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.
- burlesona 6y agoGreat 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 6y agoHe 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.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoThere are market forces behind the engagement cult, so - unfortunately - they're probably not wrong while those forces continue to operate. The root of that problem is the use of the web as a device for capturing time and attention and selling that attention to third parties. As long as that continues to be the prime directive, the race to the bottom will continue.
- bhntr3 6y agoSo 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.
- dmje 6y agoSuperb 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..
- gumby 6y agoA 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.
- draw_down 6y agoI don’t find these ideas useful, in the sense of having explanatory or predictive power. To me this reads like academics, writers, and other elites who used to frame and guide discourse lamenting that discourse has been opened up such that they no longer control it. That’s not to say discourse has improved due to that shift, and I’m sure some of the deficiencies noted here are real. But you have to ask, what do these notions of context or content collapse help us understand? More than just gussying up the claim that social media is bad. This just seems like fodder with which to sell books, hold conferences, etc. Mostly shibboleths. This was written before the current flare-up of protests in the US (and other countries as well), which were indisputably driven by social media. I wonder if Black Lives Matter is a context collapse or a content collapse. :rolleyes:
- numpad0 6y agoAt 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.
- antonzabirko 6y agoIt'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 6y agoA 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.
- svantana 6y agoAs 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.
- hnaccy 6y agoTiktok being the notable exception since most content there is pointless without audio/music on.
- edoceo 6y ago> most content there is pointless Full stop.
- svantana 6y agoTrue, although I would say the content would be even more pointless without the video - the main idea is clearly to present yourself visually. My daughter uses it a lot and an interesting side effect is that she knows a lot of music I didn't expect her to know (various 90's hits etc), but she only knows the hook/chorus or whatever 10-20 second part is used on tiktok.
- 6y ago
- gz5 6y agoGreat 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 6y agoFinite 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 6y agoGood 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.
- inetknght 6y agoThis 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 6y agoUse plain HTTP.
- kumarvvr 6y agoA 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 6y agoYou could simply use cryptography to sign all messages sent by sources. Problem solved.
- kumarvvr 6y agoThat 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 6y agoAgreed 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)
- numpad0 6y agoCryptography can be used to verify random person as authentic random person, yeah
- pjc50 6y ago"You can't sign a quote", said a spokesperson for the Misuse Of Crypto Bureau today.
- pixl97 6y ago
- cdaringe 6y agoI 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.
- DanielBMarkham 6y agoGreat 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 6y agoI 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.
- kevinstubbs 6y agoInterestingly, 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
- DangitBobby 6y ago> 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.
- igammarays 6y agoI 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.
- bushin 6y agoPutin is infamous for speaking like a low-class thug cos that's how he spent his youth.
- 082349872349872 6y agoPutin'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.
- mostlysimilar 6y agoTo 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.
- jraedisch 6y agoThe last two params are why I like the proposal of Twitter becoming a "dumb" protocol leaving all filtering to the client.
- xtiansimon 6y ago> "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-film-is-about-whats-gone-wrong-with-american-politics https://www.npr.org/2020/06/25/883233441/jon-stewarts-new-fi... [2]: As recent FB ad boycott makes clear, Who can afford TV ads?