The uni-context: you already know what it is, you just haven't got a name for it (yet)
This conversation between Derek Thompson and philosopher Agnes Callard is well worth reading in its entirety. Callard talks about the "uni-context" something which we all have felt as a kind of "context collapse" but haven't really had a more universal name for.
Derek Thompson: What is the uni-context? **Agnes Callard: Let’s start with the word context. A context is a set of circumstances that tell you how you should act. For most of human history, contexts were local and multiple. If you wanted to know how you should act, you would look around. Am I in a field? Am I inside my home? Am I in the church? Am I in a bar? You would immediately get guidance by looking both at your physical environment and at the people around you and how they were acting.
The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts. There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.
Much of the conversation is summarised by Thompson part-way through:
Derek Thompson: [...] For most of human history, people judged norms based on local context. A home had its own rules, a cathedral its own rules, and a classroom or bar or funeral parlor had its own rules. But now it is almost like we are constantly living in universal rooms, and the universal room we occupy is assumed to have universal values and universal norms. That has specific implications. First, rather than talk about what is good, which is context-dependent, we tend to focus about universal truths, and it’s easier to talk about universal bads than goods, so people focus on negativity. Two, character is context-dependent, so we talk less about character and more about its universalist equivalent, which is identity.
There’s a third implication [...] If everyone is on the same comparable plane, the same evaluative field, then comparison itself becomes a more inextricable part of life.
But what about the implications of the uni-context? What does it lead to? Thompson raises the issue of negativity bias on online interactions, and asks Callard why this is the case:
Callard: In general, goodness is more context-dependent than badness. There isn’t really anything that’s good all the time for everyone independent of context. Happiness depends on your context and who you are. There isn’t anything that will always make a person happy. But there are reliable ways to make people unhappy. There’s a set of evils that are close to universal: death, pain, illness, violence. Even if someone’s in very different circumstances from yours, if you see they’re being subjected to one of those, you can interpret it as suffering and understand it.
So we should predict that what we see on the internet, insofar as people are trying to be legible to large groups, is that they focus their attention on things that show up to everyone. Take two strangers on the internet trying to talk to each other. What are they going to coordinate on as a topic they can both care about? It’s likely going to be something bad.
[...] **Thompson: Another implication is the way the uni-context makes identity more important than character. Can you explain how, and why? **Callard: First, let’s define what character is. The fact that I have to tell you is itself telling; that word is less familiar to us. Everyone knows what identity is, but we might not be sure what character is anymore. Character refers to a set of dispositions that shape how you navigate your emotional life across a variety of circumstances. A courageous person navigates their emotional life in relation to fear. You could be anger-prone, or generous. Your character is a set of dispositions that determine how you respond to a big variety of circumstances.
The thing about character is that it shows up differently in different circumstances. Say I’m irascible, easily provoked to anger. Even an irascible person isn’t angry all the time. There might be circumstances where everybody gets angry, and so you can’t see my irascibility, because even though I’m angry, so is everybody else. Grasping character requires a lot of context. To understand someone’s character, you need to know them well and to have experienced them in a variety of contexts before you can generalize.
With identity categories like woman, disabled, gay, Jewish, or American, the striking thing is that you are a member of those categories in every circumstance. There is no circumstance in which I stop being a woman. Identity is a hat you never take off. So identity is well suited to a uni-contextual world.
So we become two-dimensional avatars who stand for something, rather than being understood as complex, three-dimensional characters who have dispositions and tendencies. We become more tribal, putting ourselves into camps, because it helps create a more stable identity for the uni-context.
It's also encouraged by the neoliberal capitalist waters in which we all swim, as Thompson explains. The problem is, though, because we're always paying continuous partial attention to the wider uni-context, we live, as Callard says, "abstractly":
Thompson: What are markets very good at? Creating a single comparative field. That’s how they coordinate prices, supply and demand. It’s one thing for there to be a market for carrots and eggs. But in the dating world now there’s a marketplace of single people. In sports, a marketplace of players who can be compared by specific analytics that homogenize and flatten strategy.
So there’s a way in which your theory of the uni-context is a way of saying the modern experience is the awareness that we are all participants in a global marketplace in which we previously were not. When I’m posting something on Twitter, I know a universe of people can see it, and I’m going to be voted up and down against other people posting in those marketplaces for attention. As we coexist in more marketplaces, it changes the way we think about ourselves and our values.
[...] **Callard: [...] We live our lives so abstractly now. If you want to say we’re in a marketplace, that’s fine as a metaphor for the idea that we are engaged in abstract value calculations that allow everything to be compared to everything else. We tend to use money and markets as a metaphor for that activity, but over the past hundred years even what money and markets are has been transformed by this process of abstraction. The deeper thread is that we live very abstractly. We manage ourselves and our experiences in very top-down ways.
In turn, this affects the attention we can pay in any given situation. Because the context of our interactions isn't our immediate physical environment, we can be distracted by almost anything. So, as I mentioned in a previous post, we live in a world of attention spam.
Callard: The norm for human beings is a bottom-up management of attention. You pay attention to what’s salient in your environment, and the ability to be distracted from what you’re attending to is important in a creature that might at any moment face a snarling animal or a fire. So the default is that you pay attention to what demands your attention.
What the uni-context brings is a newfound top-down management of attention, where we constantly feel that we have to make decisions about how to manage our attention. We feel constantly like we’re letting ourselves get distracted, which is another way of saying we are failing to manage our attention with an iron enough fist. We have products to help us fight against the very objects we purchase, like our phones. We’re in a war with ourselves. That war is the attempt to do top-down management on an aspect of our psychology that evolved to be more homeostatic, more responsive to an environment.
One illustration: There are a lot of 19th-century novels in which someone is reading a novel, like Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. It’s always a woman. This woman has a turbulent emotional life, because her lover is being problematic, so she gets distracted from the novel and puts it down. But a thing that never happens is her saying to herself, “no, I need to get through another 20 pages.” That kind of attention management—thinking, “I’m reading this book and I need to focus on it!”—is just not a thing people did in the 19th century. That shows you how different a creature the human of today is. **Thompson: The uni-context puts us in a universal room, where we become aware of more ideas, more people, more things that we could be paying attention to but aren not. Our response to this is to develop a theory of attention that treats it as a resource to manage. We think, “I have to only focus on the perfect things!” And this makes us obsessed with, and fearful of, distraction in a way that is historically unique. **Callard: It is a mark of the top-down management of attention. The question, "what should I pay attention to?” is not a function of anything about my local environment. I can’t use cues in my local environment to tell me what to attend to, because in pretty much every environment these days, there’s a screen. It’s there no matter what. It allows me to choose. It puts me in this giant evaluative field as to what I could attend to, the sufferings of people far away if I chose. So I stand in this choice relation to my attention.
Again, I encourage you to read the whole thing. It's great.
Source: Derek Thompson