context is queen

The true influence of Post Internet People on general internet socialization was both more subtle and more important than simply a shiny new social networking site. By joining the social internet after their parents were already there, they faced an especially dire version of “context collapse.” This is danah boyd’s term for when people from all

In the old world of broadcast communication that Naomi Klein wrote about, promotion was limited to a few channels, so multinationals with massive advertising budgets had the power to sell a brand monoculture. Now every night, on Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok, we scroll and see brands smushed up next to real people in the feed. Branding

it's the totality of those “nodal points” that indicate one’s own unique perspective. It doesn’t matter if you specifically sought out the nodal point or not, it’s the recognition that counts. When you encounter a piece of life-changing information (no matter how large the change part is), you are simultaneously discovering and creating “yourself,”

on Are.na, pieces of information can be arranged in infinite varieties of contexts – their respective meaning shifts as the proximate information shifts. In other words, the more connections a block has, the more opportunities it has to be a nodal point.

What matters more is how we relate with memory, that is to say how we look back to understand our history and retroactively give meaning and context to our lives

The way we see things is always affected by what we know or believe. Nietzsche said something else fitting to this: “Ultimately no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access through experience one has no ear for.”

The context opens a spectator’s mind to discover the complexity behind what she is seeing. In the end, the “thing-in-itself” is rarely what is most significant. Rather, it’s the connections and the in-betweens that make it all tangible.

In John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Berger describes the relation between what we see and what we know, more precisely arguing that what we know impacts what we see (and vice versa). Talking about the ubiquitous abundance of images and their increasingly ephemeral, insubstantial, and available meaning, he says, “If the new language of images were used