Over-subscribed, under-contexted

I'm digesting the last episode of the NCE podcast and keep circling back to the centrality of context in these conversations - missing context, stolen context, assumed context, creating context.

I think context is what's at stake when Joshua talks about being oversubscribed, which for me means too much information from too many sources, without a framework to hold it all together. Likewise, the disintermediation that he describes as a consequence (strategy?) of Web 2.0 platforms is about the destruction of context, whether unintentionally or for profit--the creation of a vacuum to be filled with ad content. And when Yancey mentions "the wastefulness of hot takes," I take that to mean that the perspective's value diminishes so quickly because it has no ecosystem of information to sustain it beyond a single moment. Both the heat of the take and the energy used to distribute and consume or respond to it, all burnt up for nothing. Obviously, the idea of "context collapse" is nothing new, but I'm really feeling how widespread and constant it is; so much of my media consumption really has no coherent background to it, no substantial connecting pathways, despite the glut of links and Wikipedia references available to me at any moment.

Conversely, context is what enriches the art/performance event hosted by a friend, even if I know little about the work (and don't end up liking it). I get some context going to my city's art museums, even over repeated visits or to see exhibits I would have little interest in on their own merits--I don't mean the curatorial tags but the physical space, the drive across town and hunt for a parking spot, the sequence of other exhibits I've seen there over the years and how they've stuck with me. Actual context means information and relationships that mean something to me physically, emotionally, socially (all those things that LLMs, in my opinion, don't have access to--but that's a digression). Museums are like magazines in that way; the accumulated (literal) layers on my desk or coffee table, the article torn out and handed (or forwarded in an email) to a friend.

And the context provided by institutions and editorial visions is not just about content (the internal coherence of an issue, an exhibition, etc.). Context resides ultimately, or equally, in the audience's senses and self-awareness, in a community's knowledge base, its lore, its merch. This might be the most substantial value proposition offered by curation and thoughtful mediation. We are context-rich beings and need meaningful information to be healthy and free. Finding, (re)building, sharing context is for me the possibility that seems most valuable in dark forest spaces, where the middle ranges of thinking, feeling, and agency are built to human rather than infinite scale.

Also, I wasn't sure which channel to post this in--still learning the context here, I guess. But thanks for reading my scrambled reflections on the episode.