I wonder, though, if this really began with the computer and the internet. Didn't we start down this path with television? The same indictment – “ a jumble, high mixed with low, silly with smart, tragic with trivial” – can be laid against the Today show or Good Morning America.
From context collapse to content collapse
Content collapse, as I define it, is the tendency of social media to blur traditional distinctions among once distinct types of information — distinctions of form, register, sense, and importance. As social media becomes the main conduit for information of all sorts — personal correspondence, news and opinion, entertainment, art, instruction, and on and on — it homogenizes that information as well as our responses to it.
Content began collapsing the moment it began to be delivered through computers. Digitization made it possible to deliver information that had required specialized mediums — newspapers and magazines, vinyl records and cassettes, radios, TVs, telephones, cinemas, etc. — through a single, universal medium. In the process, the formal standards and organizational hierarchies inherent to the old mediums began to disappear. The computer flattened everything.
I remember, years ago, being struck by the haphazardness of the headlines flowing through my RSS reader. I’d look at the latest update to the New York Times feed, for instance, and I’d see something like this:
Dam Collapse Feared as Flood Waters Rise in Midwest
Nike’s New Sneaker Becomes Object of Lust
Britney Spears Cleans Up Her Act
Scores Dead in Baghdad Car-Bomb Attack
A Spicy New Take on Bean Dip
It wasn’t just that the headlines, free-floating, decontextualized motes of journalism ginned up to trigger reflexive mouse clicks, had displaced the stories. It was that the whole organizing structure of the newspaper, its epistemological architecture, had been junked. The news section (with its local, national, and international subsections), the sports section, the arts section, the living section, the opinion pages: they’d all been fed through a shredder, then thrown into a wind tunnel. What appeared on the screen was a jumble, high mixed with low, silly with smart, tragic with trivial. The cacophony of the RSS feed, it’s now clear, heralded a sea change in the distribution and consumption of information. The new order would be disorder.
One minute George Stephanopoulos is gravely reporting on the civil war in Syria or a deadly natural disaster. The, seamlessly, he is hyping Disney's next blockbuster or some pop diva's latest album.
Facebook did not give us the Oprah-style townhall debates – television did. The epic decline from Lincoln vs. Douglas to boxers vs. briefs happened before social media was born.
If there is anything novel about about our internet-fueled media environment it is that now the information consumer largely determines their own mixture of high/low, silly/smart instead of a priesthood of deciders in New York and LA.
“Formal standards and organizational hierarchies” were undermined by the internet. The deciders lost credibility and authority when they could no longer hide their mistakes. No more 40 word “corrections“ on page A14 six days after the story ran. Now errors and bias were laid bare in real time.
How can we speak of “formal standards” when Dan Rather and Brian Williams are still treated as reputable journalists by other journalists?
And what of Twitter? We see content collapse in the timelines of the very priesthood that pretends to uphold the standards of serious, high-minded journalism. One moment there is the sober pronouncement about trade policy and the next moment brings another sober pronouncement but this one assigns the hot dog a position in the sandwich hierarchy. Then, after a quick comment on the president's speech we get excited effusions about the latest comic book movie.
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