Context Collapse
one post, every audience, zero context. that's the trap.
Grounded in the research on danah boyd & Alice Marwick, 'I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately' (2011); Erving Goffman's audience segregation
so what even is this?
context collapse is when every audience you'd normally keep separate gets crushed into one feed at the same time. your mom, your ex, your boss, your group chat, a recruiter, a random hater. offline you'd say different things to each of them. online there's one post and it hits all of them at once. you can't tune the message to the room because it's every room.
where'd it come from?
danah boyd and Alice Marwick named it in 2011 studying how people tweet to an 'imagined audience' that never matches the real one. the deeper root is Erving Goffman, 1959: in real life you do 'audience segregation,' a different self per crowd. social media deleted the walls between those crowds. so the term is academic and real, not just an influencer buzzword.