| Abstrakt: |
The collapsing of social contexts together has emerged as an important topic with the rise of social media that so often blurs the public and private, professional and personal, and the many different selves and situations in which individuals find themselves. Academic literature is starting to address the how the meshing of social contexts online has many potentially beneficial as well as problematic consequences. However, context collapse in its recent emergence has received little theoretical treatment. Here, we draw upon empirical research on social media and attempt to do just a small part of this conceptual work by first distinguishing two different types of context collapse, splitting collapse into "context collusions" and "context collisions", with the important distinction being that the former is an intentional context collapsing while the latter is unintentional. Second, in identifying the process of context collapse we must also recognize its opposite, the process by which contexts are not collapsed but reinforced through compartmentalization. To illustrate this latter point, we take the example of the smartphone application Snapchat and how its affordances counter previous social media to compartmentalize context rather than collapse it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
