Context Creation.
A week or so ago, I used the phrase “context creation” in a parenthetical and since then have been telling everyone I know that I’m obsessed with it as a concept. The obvious contrast to draw is against “content creation,” and when I searched the phrase online, I found one example of that comparison, made by the excellent cartoonist Lucy Bellwood, but otherwise very little use of the phrase whatsoever. I think that should change.
Before I get into that, let me give some examples to help illustrate what I mean by context creation. I’ve divided those between online and offline examples mostly because it was much easier to think of online examples and I wanted to make sure I didn’t represent it as a purely online phenomenon.
Online Examples
Know Your Meme is never the first website you'll visit when you open your browser, but if you're ever baffled by an inscrutable tweet or inexplicable GIF, it’ll probably be the first website you visit after the first website you visit. A wiki for memes, each page documents the origin and evolution of a given meme and explains its uses and variations, often linking to or categorizing it with related memes. What makes Know Your Meme such a useful example of context creation is that it exists just for people seeking context — it’s the whole point.
Wikipedia, from a user’s perspective, is something different. People don’t really go to Wikipedia looking for context; we use it to find things out and learn new information. And yet despite seeming like an endless source of knowledge, what we all have probably had drilled into our heads is that Wikipedia is not a source, and this is by design. The “No Original Research” principle is central to the approach Wikipedia editors take to their work. No one is bringing new knowledge to Wikipedia; instead, the work is to contextualize knowledge — linking and categorizing, sourcing and editing. Somewhere between Know Your Meme and Wikipedia are fan wikis like the Wookieepedia, where you might as likely turn for information (“just how many Star Wars movies are there anyway”) or context for something you saw in a movie (“what is Darth Maul doing with this crime syndicate 22 years after being cut in half by Obi Wan Kenobi?”).
FOAF and the semantic web. Wikipedia thrives as a center of context creation on the web because it’s perfectly suited to hypertext as a medium. What the semantic web tried to do, with experiments like the Friend of a Friend protocol, was to extend that model to more types of information. It’s not something I’m an expert on, and it’s not something I’m going to try to write a post-mortem for, but it’s a notable failed attempt at context creation that serves well as a foil to my next example.
Facebook. Where FOAF relied on internet users creating and formatting social graph data to host on their own websites, Facebook and earlier social media sites gave users an easy way to get online and made form-filling something that could be fun. In its early days (and even by the time I joined about 5 years later), using Facebook was about maintaining your profile and building your friends list. Status updates were actual status updates, and we wrote them in that context, with our names at the top flowing into the text of the update — “Jeanne Woodbury: is eating lunch.” To interact with someone, you might post on their wall, and using the site involved visiting other users’ profiles to a far greater degree than it does today. The introduction of the News Feed didn’t immediately disrupt this, but from the start it meant controversial decisions had to be made about which updates to feature in the feed. Status updates became more like tweets or blog posts, and as interaction increasingly shifted to the news feed, allowing pages to publish to your feed in an effort to compete with Twitter only accelerated that transition. Answering the question of how to handle the sheer volume of content flowing through each user’s feed eventually meant leaving the chronological timeline behind. EdgeRank gave users the false sense that their feeds were showing them all of the updates they should be seeing, even as the algorithm behind the feed meant, by design, that some connections might not be displayed at all. Eventually what users learned was that if you wanted your friends to see your updates, they needed to be engaging enough to rank. This was the full arc of Facebook’s evolution from context creation to content creation, and after the company had effectively monopolized social graph data, it was an epochal shift.
Some Quick Offline Examples
Hosting a dinner party or book club. Just by putting everyone in the same space, you’re creating context. All of the guests reading the same book creates context for the group. Making introductions as a host is another form of context creation.
Broadcast television, when there were only a handful of channels, was a large scale exercise in context creation (by giving tens of millions of people something to talk about, on a synchronized schedule).
I can’t also turn this into an essay about money, but when the government issues money, it’s creating context for transactions and exchanges that otherwise might lack a shared reference point.
When I first used the phrase “context creation,” I was griping about what I see as an annoyingly narrow focus on suggestion algorithms in tech criticism and policy making. Certainly there’s a lot to untangle there, but it’s frustrating to see so much energy directed into questions of how to reform those algorithms when it’s not obvious to me that there’s anything essential about them to discovery or social interaction on the web.
The bifurcated experience of Twitter, where some users (like me) read a reverse-chronological timeline and many others use an algorithmically ordered and curated feed, leads to a very real degree of annoyance among users in the first group when users in the second group voice the complaint, as they often do, of “why am I seeing this?” Our chronological-purist response is simple — you control who you follow! — but the question reveals the stark lack of context many users have for the content they interact with online. For longtime users of the platform, who rely on manual discovery and eschew the algorithmic timeline, the majority of tweets they’ll read in a day are rich with context: they know which users interact with which other users, they are familiar with the kind of jokes the users they follow make or are likely to retweet, and they’re able to see or at least intuit the shape of the conversation happening on their timeline. This increasingly seems to be anomalous.
Even Twitter itself is a relatively minor player among the major social networks, as an ever growing share of attention is captured by TikTok, evidently the preeminent content recommendation engine on the internet, one where a social graph is not even a factor. Instagram, which grew as an image sharing service on the Twitter social graph, is now Meta’s main bet against TikTok, chasing its feature set with Reels and waffling on just how much to deprioritize its once-central feed, at times showing only one or two recent posts by accounts a user actually chose to follow before flowing into algorithmic recommendations. This of course very closely mirrors Facebook’s own development as a product from context creation to content creation, discussed above.
I don’t think this is some kind of apocalyptic trend in social media — at the same time that every major platform seems intent on turning into personalized shopping channels, smaller messaging platforms like Discord are rising up to fill the gap. Individual Discord servers are created with context built in, whether as the backroom chat space for a subreddit or as an organizing hub for a social movement, and within a server, mods can create topical channels for more focused conversations. Communication is impossible without context. The more social networks do to pivot from context creation to content creation, the more impossible it becomes for real conversations to happen there, and the more motivated users will become to create their own spaces for conversation somewhere else. But communication is more than just conversation, and what private and semi-private chatrooms like those on Discord lack is discoverability. Context at a larger scale is key to building and structuring relationships between people, and if the primary ways we have to use the internet consist of services that show us exactly what we want, based on what we already like, and closed networks where we interact only with people we already know, or already know we share an opinion with, we lack that kind of context most of all.
Building new experiences on the web, or new social movements, or even new political realities is going to require a new focus on context creation. This much is clear to me. What I’m seeing right now instead is, in essence, fiddling with the knobs on the recommendation machine while Rome burns.