context collapse

English

Etymology

Coined by social media scholar and youth researcher Danah M. Boyd.

Noun

context collapse (uncountable)

  1. (sociology) The flattening of multiple audiences into a single context, so that information intended for one audience finds its way to another, as with television and the Internet.
    • 2015, S. Shyam Sundar, editor, The Handbook of the Psychology of Communication Technology, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 218:
      Although context collapse can happen in offline settings, such as a wedding, online spaces that enable communication among groups traditionally associated with different facets of one's identity are often sites of context collapse.
    • 2018, Whitney Phillips, Ryan M. Milner, The Ambivalent Internet […] , John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 122:
      Within different communities, groups, or dyads, the same memetic media could be deployed as a long-standing community in-joke, dadaist absurdity, or even as fighting words (or images, as the case may be). […] These texts might still be constitutive, but as a result of rampant context collapse, it's not clear what worlds are being built by whom, what worlds are being challenged or dismantled, who's being invited into the conversation and who's being ridiculed, particularly when content begins zooming unattributed across and between online communities.
    • 2019, Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, →ISBN, page 163:
      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.
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