Tagged with: authenticity • context • jonathan fields • message • out of context • social-problems
Sometimes politicians say stupid things during newspaper interviews. Luckily, they can always claim it was taken out of context. Politician really want to control their message.
But even the most notorious evangelists of “being yourself”, “awesome authenticity”, “just say what’s on your mind”, “let your message flow free” a.k.a. The Social Media Advocates (yes, that’s me included) have concerns about message and context.
“When I’m at an event, a gathering, meeting or just having lunch, I’ve come to learn that every word out of my mouth is fair game for social media attribution and distribution. … And, that freaks me out a bit. Because when I put the message out there, I give it context. But, when others translate it to social media, especially media that only allows for cherry-picked snippets… who knows?”
Yes. Who Knows?
This separation of message and context is a lot on my mind lately.
When you think about the words you are going to write, you have a certain mindset. You have experienced things; talked about stuff, you have a specific intent. You know: context.
Then you just send the message.
A receiver picks it up. Looks at the sender and the text. If you are lucky, they will make an effort trying to “know you” and build up the context from cues you provide. If you aren’t that lucky they just see your name, and go “meh”. Stereotypes. Mind is already made up. All kinds of mechanisms to ensure there is a context alright, but it ain’t yours.
The separation of message and context is even worse online. It’s easy to copy a piece of a message. The internet is also incredibly big, it is easy to hide the context from the message; to remove almost any link between message and context.
By default everything is out of context.
Does this worry you?
