by Jenny Odell
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IN A 2013 blog post about whether or not she coined the term “context collapse,” boyd points to her indebtedness to a book by Joshua Meyrowitz called No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. Written in 1985 and mostly concerning electronic media like TV and radio, Meyrowitz’s work reads now as eerily prescient, ripe for translation by boyd into online terms. At its very outset, No Sense of Place presents a thought experiment that sounds like the analog version of modern-day Twitter. Meyrowitz writes that when he was in college in the 1950s, he’d gone on an exciting three-month summer vacation, and when he got home, he was eager to share his experiences with his friends, family, and other acquaintances. Obviously, he says, he varied the stories and the telling based on the audience: his parents got the clean version, his friends got the adventurous version, and his professors got the cultured version.
Meyrowitz asks us to consider what would happen to his trip narrative if, on his return, his parents had thrown him a surprise homecoming party where all of those groups were present together. He ventures that he would have either 1) offended one or more of the groups, or 2) created a “synthesized” account that was “bland enough to offend no one.” But no matter which one, he writes, “the situation would have been profoundly different from the interactions I had with isolated audiences.”5 Meyrowitz’s imagined options are analogous to boyd and Marwick’s observations in their paper on Twitter users and personal brands. Option 1 (offending an unintended audience) is what happens with those whose old tweets are dug up; Option 2 (“bland enough to offend no one”) is the professional social media star, a person reverse-engineered from a formula of what is most palatable to everyone all the time. Taken to its logical conclusion, Option 2 would eventually create a race to the mediocre bottom that has been repeatedly decried by cultural critics like Jaron Lanier.
The surprise homecoming party is an example of the useful architectural metaphor that Meyrowitz employs in No Sense of Place: it’s as if all of the walls around different social environments have come down. Unfortunately, those rooms and walls were precisely what provided the spatial context for what was said in them, since they summoned a distinct audience out of the anonymous masses by only letting some people in. In turn, that audience was able to make sense of each utterance by encountering it in the space where the sentiment grew, continuous with or adjacent to other related utterances. If we imagine a collection of these “rooms” as an ecology of contexts, it’s hard not to see social media as a contextual monoculture. When Meyrowitz observes of this “one large combined social situation” that certain types of behavior will become impossible, I’m struck by two of these behaviors in particular.
The first has to do with the fact that you cannot strategize vis-à-vis other people if those people are present.6 Meyrowitz puts words to a feeling I sometimes have when watching protest movements unfold on Facebook, complete with event listings for protests where people voluntarily list themselves as “attending.” The whole process is laid out in the open. Sure, this makes it easier for potential participants to see, but it also makes it easier to find for police, detractors, and even just passersby derailing the conversation with irrelevant information.
Something like a hashtag campaign can certainly be effective for raising awareness of an issue or increasing attendance at an event where no surprises are planned. But for successful targeted maneuvers, there always seems to be a strategic alternating between openness and closure. In Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, description of the planning that led up to the Montgomery bus boycott, he describes meetings of varying sizes, all happening in different rooms of homes, schools, and churches over the course just a few days.7 These meetings were anywhere from very small (King deliberating with his wife at home) to small (King, E. D. Nixon, and Ralph Abernathy alternating calling each other on the phone) to midsize (a meeting with King, L. Roy Bennett, E. D. Nixon, and a handful of others at a church) to large (Montgomery’s black leaders from different businesses and organizations, at King’s church) to very large (a meeting open to the public, at another church). It was at the smaller meetings that they strategized how to run the larger meetings, collaborating quickly and intensely on ideas that would be put into play in successively wider contexts. And it was at the larger meetings that they strategized how to present their demands to the public at large.
That first behavior—“to plan strategies for dealing with people”—has to do with plurality within the public. The second behavior that Meyrowitz identifies as being impossible in these conditions has do with plurality within the self. He writes that with a completely generalized audience, “we would have trouble projecting a very different definition of ourselves to different people when so much other information about us was available to each of our audiences.” To this I would add the inability to publicly change our minds, i.e., to express different selves over time. This is one of the things I find the most absurd about our current social media, since it’s completely normal and human to change our minds, even about big things. Think about it: Would you want to be friends with someone who never changed their mind about anything?
But because apologizing and changing our minds online is so often framed as a weakness, we either hold our tongues or risk ridicule. Friends, family, and acquaintances can see a person who lives and grows in space and time, but the crowd can only see a figure who is expected to be as monolithic and timeless as a brand. Having worked for an old and widely recognized clothing company, I know firsthand that the pillars of any brand are internal coherence and consistency over time. (That’s literally what we called them at work: “brand pillars.”) For a brand as for a public figure—which, as we now know, any Twitter user can accidentally become overnight—change, ambiguity, and contradiction are anathema. “You have one identity,” Mark Zuckerberg famously said. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He added that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”8 Imagine what Audre Lorde, with all her different selves, would have to say to him.
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AS NO SENSE OF PLACE attests, context collapse is something we can understand spatially. But this process has a temporal cousin, which is an analogous collapse into a permanent instantaneity. Just as a series of rooms are dissolved into one big “situation,” instantaneity flattens past, present, and future into a constant, amnesiac present. The order of events, so important for understanding anything, gets drowned out by a constant alarm bell. Veronica Barassi, in her essay “Social Media, Immediacy and the Time for Democracy,” provides an example of this phenomenon among activists using social media. Specifically, she describes three challenges for activists that I think can easily be extended to anyone having problems reading, speaking, and thinking online.
First, instantaneous communication threatens visibility and comprehension because it creates an information overload whose pace is impossible to keep up with. Activists, Barassi says, “have to adapt to the pace of information and constantly produce content.” Meanwhile, information overload creates the risk that nothing gets heard. Barassi quotes an activist from Ecologistas en Acción, a confederation of Spanish ecological groups:
Everybody says that there is no censorship on the internet, or at least only in part. But that is not true. Online censorship is applied through the excess of banal content that distracts people from serious or collective issues.9
Second, the immediacy of social media closes down the time needed for “political elaboration.” Because the content that activists share online has to be “catchy,” “activists do not have the space and time to articulate their political reflections.” Barassi’s interviewees repeatedly expressed that “social media were not a space for political discussion and elaboration, because the communication was too fast, too quick, and too short.” One activist comp
lains specifically that there’s no time to “contextualize [ideas] for people” since “we need time and space to do that.”10 Barassi writes that the needed context often shows up in less instantaneous channels, such as activist magazines or in-person group discussion.
Lastly, immediacy challenges political activism because it creates “weak ties.” Barassi’s research suggests that networks built on social media “are often based on a common reaction / emotion and not on a shared political project and neither on a shared understanding of social conflict.” Strong ties and well-defined political projects, she says, still come from “action on the ground…face-to-face interaction, discussion, deliberation and confrontation.” She quotes a participant in the anti-austerity movement in Spain:
One thing that really surprised me about the 15M was that all the tweeting, all the social media messages and internet campaigns effectively had a unique effect: they made people come together in a single square, sit on the floor and start to talk…So technologies have made people come together but what made the movement so powerful was the physical space, the process of discussion, and reflection and the availability of the people to sit down and discuss without the pressure of time.11
What becomes clear in Barassi’s analysis is that thought and deliberation require not just incubation space (solitude and/or a defined context) but incubation time. My experience suggests that these challenges apply not only to activists but also to an individual trying to communicate with others, or just maintain coherent trains of thought. Whether the dialogue I want is with myself, a friend, or a group of people committed to the same cause as I am, there are concrete conditions for dialogue. Without space and time, these dialogues will not only die, they will never be born in the first place.
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SO FAR, I’VE described how the loss of spatial and temporal context happens within the attention economy. Presented with information in the form of itemized bits and sensationalized headlines—each erased by the arrival of new items at the top of the feed—we lose that which was spatially and temporally adjacent to that information. But this loss happens at a more general level as well. As the attention economy profits from keeping us trapped in a fearful present, we risk blindness to historical context at the same time that our attention is ripped from the physical reality of our surroundings.
I worry about what this means, long term, for our propensity to seek out context, or our ability to understand context at all. Given that all of the issues that face us demand an understanding of complexity, interrelationship, and nuance, the ability to seek and understand context is nothing less than a collective survival skill. Looking both to the troubling present and to successful actions in the past suggests that we will require new kinds of alliances and formations, which will further require periods both of solitude and of intense connection and communication. But how can we do that when our platforms for “connection” and expression detract from the attention to place and time that we need, simultaneously eroding the contexts that would allow new strategies to sharpen and flourish?
I think often about what an online network that attends to the spatiotemporal character of our experience as humans—animals who have evolved to learn things in space and time—would look like. I perform a reverse of Meyrowitz’s thought experiment, rebuilding the walls. I wonder what it would be like to experience a social network that was completely grounded in space and time, something you had to travel to in order to use, that worked slowly.
In fact, local history provides me with an example of just such a network. In 1972, the world’s first public bulletin board system (BBS) appeared in the form of a coin-operated kiosk at the top of the stairs to Leopold’s Records in Berkeley. It was called Community Memory, and it contained a teletype machine connected via a 110-baud modem to 24-foot-long XDS-940 time-sharing computer in San Francisco. Every day, over and over, the modem made and received calls to the San Francisco computer, ultimately printing messages for users on the teletype machine. Community Memory had been installed by a group of three computer-science dropouts from UC Berkeley, who placed it below the store’s physical bulletin board in the hopes that it would serve the same purpose, just more efficiently.
The 1972 flyer for Community Memory is almost heartbreaking to read now, amid new commonplaces like “social media fatigue,” headlines about Facebook and hate speech, and calls to ban our own president from Twitter:
COMMUNITY MEMORY is the name we give to this experimental information service. It is an attempt to harness the power of the computer in the service of the community. We hope to do this by providing a sort of super bulletin board where people can post notices of all sorts and can find the notices posted by others rapidly.12
True to their motto, “Technology for the People,” Resource One outlines their goals for the project, betraying a community-oriented, no-nonsense optimism about the promise of a computer network:
Our intention is to introduce COMMUNITY MEMORY into neighborhoods and communities in this area, and make it available for them to live with it, play with it, and shape its growth and development. The idea is to work with a process whereby technological tools, like computers, are used by the people themselves to shape their own lives and communities in sane and liberating ways. In this case the computer enables the creation of a communal memory bank, accessible to anyone in the community. With this, we can work on providing the information, services, skills, education, and economic strength our community needs. We have a powerful tool—a genie—at our disposal; the question is whether we can integrate it into our lives, support it, and use it to improve our own lives and survival capabilities. We invite your participation and suggestions.
The “interface” (which I saw in person in the same Berkeley Art Museum show as the spinning painting from the Drop City commune) was extremely user-friendly. Since the teletype machine was so noisy, the kiosk was encased in plastic, with two arm holes for typing, another hole to see what was being printed, and a coin slot. Above the coin slot, it said, READ: FREE; below: WRITE: 25¢. Several brightly colored panels highlighted key commands that could hardly be misunderstood. But many people at that time had never used a computer, so Community Memory also employed a person to sit next to the kiosk and greet people coming up the stairs.
Community Memory eventually came to be used in many unexpected ways, as Steve Silberman describes in NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, an exploration of autism and neurodiversity (Lee Felsenstein, one of the founders of Community Memory, was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome in the 1990s). At first, people used the system to buy and sell things, and musicians sought other musicians, in a higher-tech version of the analog bulletin board. But soon, Silberman writes, other things began to happen:
A poet offered sample poems, while others solicited lifts to Los Angeles; at one point, a Nubian goat was put up for sale. Some users posted ASCII art, and one posited a question that has vexed Bay Area residents for decades: “Where can I get a decent bagel?” (A baker replied by offering to provide free bagel-baking lessons.) Others held forth on Vietnam, gay liberation, and the energy crisis. Instead of merely being a computerized bulletin board, the network quickly became “a snapshot of the whole community,” Felsenstein says.13
The website for information about Community Memory, still up since it was created in the nineties, boasts that the network saw the “the first net personality,” a friendly sort of proto-troll who called himself Benway. Named after a drug-addled surgeon in William S. Burroughs’s novels, Benway left cryptic messages with phrases like “sensuous keystrokes forbidden” and “grand conclave of the parties of interzone: check your inbox for details.” Since all users of Community Memory remained anonymous, Benway’s identity remains unknown.
Additional kiosks were installed at the Berkeley Whole Earth Access Store and the Mission Branch Library in San Francisco. Because they were unsynchronized, the conversations at each terminal had a sli
ghtly different character. It’s interesting to contrast this variance with what happens today, when crowds of people in San Francisco and Oakland look at Facebook on their phones. Their information is also in a way asynchronous, since Facebook algorithms show certain things to you and not to me (and vice versa). But that variance is based on personal customization, which is motivated by advertising and the desire to increase your engagement. Variance among the Community Memory terminals, on the other hand, was based entirely on geographical location. Just as it would be with cafés, bars, and neighborhoods more generally, the local “scene” necessarily differed. But while there may have been asynchronicity across the Bay Area, there was coherence within the kiosk, an assurance that each piece of information was surrounded by geographical context—that it had a relationship to its place.