Blog Fear and the Collapse of Context

Recently I’ve been thinking it’d be good to hook up with an academic at some point next year. I spend a lot of time thinking about the cultural and social implications of blogging and related things but I’m not academically trained. To be honest I’m not really academically inclined. I’m good at putting pieces together and making connections but don’t really have the staying power for serious research mode. And that’s fine – we don’t need to be good at everything these days. We just need to collaborate.

My main motivation was a sense that surely someone out there had studied the things I’m talking about all the time and devised manageable theories and the like which I could use to ground my often spiraling thoughts. My peers, while wonderful people, don’t tend to be a lot of help in this arena as too get infected with ideas and when you put us together the end results, while fascinating and a lot of fun, aren’t necessarily that practical. So I need a friendly academic who gets this stuff. And, of course, there’s one out there. His name is Dr. Michael Wesch from Kansas State University. You’ll remember his The Machine Is Us/ing Us video that gave a potted introduction to Web 2.0 in five minutes and you might have stumbled across his Digital Ethnography course, specifically the YouTube project where students got involved with the YouTube community in order to understand it properly.

In June he gave an hour long talk at the Library of Congress which attempted to sumarise his research. (It came to me via Meg.) While it concentrates on YouTube most of what he’s describing can be applied to the social internet in general so it makes for fascinating and illuminating viewing. Here ’tis.

Of the many interesting points he raises one that really stuck out for me was “context collapse” , appearing around 22 mins in, which is expanded on in this post:

The problem is not lack of context. It is context collapse: an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording. The images, actions, and words captured by the lens at any moment can be transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved (the performer must assume) for all time. The little glass lens becomes the gateway to a blackhole sucking all of time and space – virtually all possible contexts – in upon itself.

The would-be vlogger, now frozen in front of this black hole of contexts, faces a crisis of self-presentation. In Goffman’s terms, the would-be vlogger is “out of face” with no “line” to present, unable to size up the context and situation (1967, p.14). Like a building collapse, context collapse does not create a total void but a chaotic version of its once ordered self. The would-be vlogger sits stultified as his imagination races through the nearly infinite possible contexts he might be entering, all of which pile up as parts, pieces, and pieces of parts, a rubble that becomes the ground on which he must struggle to get his footing. The familiar walls that help limit and define the context are gone. He must address anybody, everybody, and maybe even nobody all at once.

Here he’s talking about the intense blast of self awareness that people have when they first record a video, or introduce a podcast or write a post on their blog. It’s something I come across again and again and have struggled to offer advice other than to just keep at it. Eventually you’ll find your voice, I say. But perhaps it’s less finding a voice and more becoming comfortable with a chaotic context?

This fear is probably one of the biggest stumbling blocks people have when starting their blogging career. Since the medium is inherently personal you have to put something of yourself into a place where you have no control over how it’ll be perceived. Usually the fear is not justified and a balance is found but when it isn’t this notion of context collapse also helps to make sense of negative or aggressive feedback. Within some contexts you’re an erudite, sensitive person with interesting things to say but within other contexts you’re a self-obsessed idiot who’s missing the point, and both these interpretations are perfectly valid.

I wonder if there’s a psychological, or maybe psychiatric, explanation for this sort of fear one fees when the rules of engagement are not just changed by stripped away? I know from personal experience that engaging in an environment of context collapse is a fruitful and ultimately positive experience but explaining how to attain that confidence seems tricky. I wonder if lessons could be learned from sufferers of anxiety in the real world?

(It also occurs to me that maybe I’m more comfortable when there is no dominant context, where the rules are unknown. It creates a level playing field where we’re all equal. But that’s a tangent more suitable for my personal blog.)