Context Collapse

Micheal Welsh in his fascinating video about YouTube and new media talks of context collapse. When we are talking to someone in person we can naturally guess the context of the situation. The temperament of the situation, the mood of the person, their interest in what I’m talking about and also the way they will receive what we will talk. We can mold our interactions depending on the context. When you are making a YouTube video you don’t know who will watch it and in what context. It can be your next door neighbor, your friends, your enemies, someone twice your age or someone sitting across the ocean. Same goes for blogging. While creating that content a whole lot of different contexts fall in one place and this can be overwhelming. This has been a big barrier for me to blogging, in my earlier attempts at blogging I only wrote about tech stuff or book reviews because it felt less overwhelming as they can be understood in very limited contexts. One technique to get over the issue is to write your blogs for a specific person, maybe as letters, and then publish it for the world. I don’t use this technique often but it helps.