This summer, philosopher Agnes Callard introduced the concept of the ‘uni-context’ to explain how social media has changed how we live.
In essence, the uni-context is the ‘scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts,’ says Callard. It is, she notes, quite different to how people lived for most of recorded time, when behaviours were dictated by physical environments, like a church or a pub or a home. Within the uni-context, however, we act as though we are in a room with the whole world at the same time, adapting our behaviour so that it is legible and palatable to a heterogeneous mass audience.
It’s not an entirely novel concept. Neil Postman wrote in 1985 about how the telegraph introduced the world to context-less information, while people have been referring to ‘context collapse’ to describe online environments since Danah Boyd popularised the term in 2011. But the conditions that Postman and Boyd hinted at have been exacerbated over the past decade or so, and the uni-context reflects that.
Callard claims her theory can explain a lot of the phenomena that characterise online space, like the negativity bias (‘because goodness is more context-dependent than badness’), the elevation of identity over character (because character ‘shows up differently in different circumstances’) and the increase in status anxiety (because we’re now part of one massive realm of comparison).
Feeling like we are part of a single global forum also explains the obsession we have developed with managing our attention, since there is now so much information and stimuli, and our real-world surroundings can no longer tell us what is important. Or at least, can no longer do so as often.
The other thing to say about the uni-context is that it has not — in Callard’s view — been imposed on us against our will. Technologies that expand our social spheres succeed because they ‘facilitate the expression of an impulse’, an innate human desire to be a part of something big.
It would probably be best to wait for Callard to publish a full treatise on the uni-context before subscribing completely to it as a concept. But it’s a model that seems like it may yield valuable explanatory and predictive power.
