I remember learning about context clues in grade school. This is a technique to teach reading comprehension. Given a word you don’t know the definition of, you should be able to ascertain the general meaning of it by how it’s used.
“After posting a critique of the current open software landscape, her mentions and inbox were inundated with abusive messages and threats.”
If you didn’t know the definition of “inundated”, you could probably work it out by your understanding of the rest of the sentence. You might not be exact, but you get the general meaning of the word at least as it relates to the reality of the statement.
If you read “the puffy, white clouds rolled through the azure sky as the sun lazily made its way west”, you would assume that in the reality of whatever they are talking about that they are probably on Earth due to the one sun heading west and the blue sky with white clouds. But if it ended with “while two moons were beginning to peek out from the horizon”, you’d maybe think perhaps this is not Earth, or at least not the Earth you know.
The more you know someone, the more you can put their words into context to inform your understanding of situations. If some random stranger tells you to go fuck yourself, you are probably going to take it a bit differently than if someone you have known for many years on a close, personal basis tells you to go fuck yourself.
You understand reality through context. And a lot of the time, we are denied context on purpose. This is how dogwhistles work. They work so well because whole swaths of the population who can’t understand something because they are ignorant (willfully or not) of certain facts. Like messages in magic eye posters, only some people can see them.
Reality is informed by context. Context is informed by… information. And in our capitalist hellscape, we have commodified information. Commodified context. Commodified reality. The very thing you need to understand other people and the world around you costs money now. It’s why artists of all sorts beg you to pay them for their work instead of pirating it when the bigger argument on both sides is to push for all people to have what they need to live so there aren’t people who are so poor they can’t afford art and literature/can’t afford to make art and literature, but the reality of capitalism makes us argue about things like free access to books and a living wage as some sort of opposites where you can only choose one.
Because we are forced to interact with each other nearly solely online, we are often deprived of and denied context. And again, a lot of the time it is on purpose. Some of it through boundaries for safety. Some of it through purposeful manipulation for nefarious reasons. Some of it through purposeful manipulation for noble reasons. Sometimes just because it’s funny.
Not only do we need to sell our own context to other people, I also need to give enough of it for free to make them want to pay for more. The first insight into my reality is free, but the next level is going to cost you because I need medication to help me keep breathing. And I need to casually or uncasually mention negative aspects of my lived experience constantly to “excuse” my asking for compensation. I need to relive trauma over and over, publicly, so I can continue to stay alive to continue to relive my trauma over and over, publicly. You need the context of my situation, but what if I just want to be left alone but also not starve?
I haven’t figured that out. Having removed all social media accounts, of both the corporate and open source sort, I’m attempting to find a solution where I can both exist without fear of starvation, homelessness, or death and not need to rely on strangers gorging on our realities for cash, forcing us through a strip search and then making us dance a jig every time we need grocery money.
If content is king, then context is the lower classes, being oppressed and suppressed into oblivion, their labor exploited, busking for coins on the street by playing Wonderwall on a ukulele to feed their family while their neighbors post 10 second clips of it on social media in the hopes that they can monetize their brand into something that could feed their family. If our context becomes the content, and content is king, then will we all turn into monarchists, desperate for a dukedom?
In a desperate grasp to keep myself grounded in context, I’m trying to avoid places and people who have no respect for it. And while that severely limits my ability to connect with new people in the hopes of busking enough to feed my family, it equally limits being in malicious and accidental conflicts due to or weaponized with context deprivation which also leads to limits on my ability to busk enough to feed my family.
For further context, my entire family is me and two cats.
