Does context really collapse in social media interaction?

Malgorzata Szabla,Jan Blommaert

doi:10.1515/applirev-2017-0119

Abstract

Abstract ‘Context collapse’ (CC) refers to the phenomenon widely debated in social media research, where various audiences convene around single communicative acts in new networked publics, causing confusion and anxiety among social media users. The notion of CC is a key one in the reimagination of social life as a consequence of the mediation technologies we associate with the Web 2.0. CC is undertheorized, and in this paper we intend not to rebuke it but to explore its limits. We do so by shifting the analytical focus from “online communication” in general to specific forms of social action performed, not by predefined “group” members, but by actors engaging in emerging kinds of sharedness based on existing norms of interaction. This approach is a radical choice for action rather than actor, reaching back to symbolic interactionism and beyond to Mead, Strauss and other interactionist sociologists, and inspired by contemporary linguistic ethnography and interactional sociolinguistics, notably the work of Rampton and the Goodwins. We apply this approach to an extraordinarily complex Facebook discussion among Polish people residing in The Netherlands – a set of data that could instantly be selected as a likely site for context collapse. We shall analyze fragments in detail, showing how, in spite of the complications intrinsic to such online, profoundly mediated and oddly ‘placed’ interaction events, participants appear capable of ‘normal’ modes of interaction and participant selection. In fact, the ‘networked publics’ rarely seem to occur in practice, and contexts do not collapse but expand continuously without causing major issues for contextualization. The analysis will offer a vocabulary and methodology for addressing the complexities of the largest new social space on earth: the space of online culture.

Highlights

In social media studies, the notion of “context collapse” has acquired considerable currency.1 It is part of an – often tacitly adopted – theory of communication grounded, in turn, in a particular imagery of the social world, and stands for the flattening out of multiple distinct audiences in one’s social network, such that people from different contexts become part of a singular group of message recipients. (Vitak 2012: 541)This is generally seen as a problem, something that distorts “normal” assumptions about communication and requires caution and repair strategies
This problem is an effect of the specific features of social network communication, the technology of which “complicates our metaphors of space and place, including the belief that audiences are separate from each other” (Marwick and boyd 2010: 115), and has taken us from a world of relatively transparent audiences to that of far less transparent “networked publics”
Users on social network sites (SNS) have assumptions about whom they are addressing and interacting with, but the features of SNS do not correspond to these assumptions and create indeterminacy in audience selection, with confusion and uncertainty of users as one effect

Summary

Introduction

The notion of “context collapse” has acquired considerable currency. It is part of an – often tacitly adopted – theory of communication grounded, in turn, in a particular imagery of the social world, and stands for the flattening out of multiple distinct audiences in one’s social network, such that people from different contexts become part of a singular group of message recipients. (Vitak 2012: 541). The notion of “context collapse” has acquired considerable currency.1 It is part of an – often tacitly adopted – theory of communication grounded, in turn, in a particular imagery of the social world, and stands for the flattening out of multiple distinct audiences in one’s social network, such that people from different contexts become part of a singular group of message recipients. – and with a maximum of social sharedness, relating to the nature and identities involved and the audiences addressed People, so it seems, had just one set of common assumptions about communication: those directing simple dyadic face-to-face conversation in a world known to both participants. It is the presence of such unintended audiences that generates context collapse

An interaction-centered alternative

Complex compound social action on SNS: A case

The rules of a complex game

Navigating multiple contexts

Does context really collapse?