If you maintain an online presence in any way – I am including facebook in that – watch 17:22 – 21:18. Four minutes, that’s all. This section introduces and defines “context collapse”, my big takeaway, the phenomenon which is the cause of all my stops and starts venturing online. (see end note for more)

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“Context Collapse”

On this blog, I am not writing to anyone in particular, yet I am also writing to everyone in the whole world. And thus I have no context in which to set this text. Comparing blogs to emails is illustrative. Both are means of communication in which the authors of the ideas are clearly identified. But an email is highly contextualized since it is limited to a specific group of people, while a blog that is posted publicly on the internet is in a sense addressed to the whole world and therefore lacks a defined context.

For example, let’s look at my last post. Instead of putting my concerns online, I could have sent it to my school’s director of technology, Justin Hardman. Here’s what the email would look like:

Emailing Justin

But by putting it onto my blog, here is who I am addressing it to:

Blogging the Whole World

And it’s not like a normal “bcc” – in email, the people who are blind are the ones who actually receive the email, as they don’t know who else might be a recipient. But on a blog, I’m the one who is blind. I have absolutely no clue who is choosing to point their browser this way.

That’s the part that has me messed up. I am worried both about who specifically will come to view the blog – the wrong member of my school’s board, or the wrong overreacting parent. But I am also concerned with remaining authentic to whoever else in the world might come to view these ideas.

Not so worried that I won’t blog. But I find I can’t stop (over) thinking it.

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End Note: But I recommed the whole video. You can split it up into two manageable chunks – up until 14:00, the focus is on the philosophical ramifications of new digital media and how it is changing conceptions of self and identity. From 14:00 til the end, it summarizes Welsh’s ethnographic research into Youtube. Well worth the time!