Context collapse

Yesterday in our class we engaged Michael Wesch’s lecture at the Library of Congress from four years ago. Four years is a long time in digital culture, and there are many parts of that provocative lecture that are already being contested (I think about the vast commercial invasion of YouTube, for instance).

Nevertheless, he shares several conceptual frames that are very useful. One of them is the notion of "context collapse" (appearing somewhere around 21:26 in this video). Wesch uses it to describe the way in which recording a vlog for YouTube is at once a very intimate process -- most often people are by themselves, speaking directly into the small camera on their computer, almost talking to themselves -- and at the same time potentially a global broadcast, given that once something is up at YouTube anyone with access to the net can watch and comment on it.

Many people are deeply worried about context collapse, in part because they fear -- with some legitimacy -- that it is a symptom of our communities falling apart, real physical embodied relationality being stretched to nothing more than egocentric fantasizing. I think that egocentrism is a very real sin that we need to engage, and context collapse could be a symptom of it -- but as Wesch points out, "anonymity + physical distance + rare and ephemeral dialogue" not only can equal "hatred as public performance," but can also provide the "freedom to experience humanity without fear or anxiety" (29:13).

Why am I thinking about this, this morning? In part because I love the remix of Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call me maybe" that has been put out by Coochwatch.com, as "Hands off crazy." (See my previous blog on the video.) The music video remix is a deliberate attempt to call attention to problematic aspects of Kenneth Cuccinelli's efforts to interfere with women's reproductive health care while serving as Virginia's attorney general. He's now running for governor in Virginia. Some of his actions could be -- indeed, have been -- received as deeply oppressive to women in Virgina. In that kind of situation it's often easy to want to succumb to despair. What can young women in the state, who have very little access to the power and financing behind Cuccinelli's campaign apparatus, do to defeat him electorally?

And this is where both the music video remix, and context collapse come in. Because these young women can and have done something very powerful. They have intervened in the public discourse using what Boleman and Deal identify as "cultural/symbolic" power. They have taken their energy and righteous outrage and used them to create a highly energizing, joy-filled remix of a popular song to spread the news about Cuccinelli, and to invite people to join their organized efforts to defeat him electorally.

I do not live anywhere near Virginia, and have a lot of electoral battles to fight in the upper Midwest, but I feel connected to these young women and I want to join them. This is a constructive effect of "context collapse." While specific kinds of physical context are collapsing, human beings are nonetheless contextual creatures who keep finding ways to create context. Context is not simply about physical nearness, it is about all of the ways in which we understand, construct, contest, negotiate with, and so on, our relationality.

But it's not simply a matter of people like me being drawn into the electoral struggle in Virginia. There's something larger going on here. That something larger has to do with the odd beliefs of many of our elected officials being drawn out into the light of public awareness. Their beliefs likely did not seem odd to them in the narrow circles in which they normally function. I'm fairly sure that Kenneth Cuccinelli's beliefs, for instance, seem highly logical, appropriate, maybe even women-supportive, in the narrow and constrained circles of a certain kind of context, a certain kind of reality construction. I think something very similar is happening to Todd Akin.

The ability of these public leaders to pursue their oppressive agendas is in many ways deeply constrained by an ever-widening public sphere that is accessible (at least for the moment) to people who do not have vast sums of money and structure behind them. Their context is collapsing around their ears. That actually gives me hope.

And so, this morning, I give you "Hands off crazy" (again) as a positive example of context collapse.