The Private Made Public
You could be having a conversation in private. Or, you could be currently scryed upon. There might be invisible spies in your midst, listening to your every word. Even without the addition of magical means of surreptitious observation, letters can be intercepted, conversations overheard, and the private made public. Imagine a spell which has the power to turn the most intimate conversations and images shared between friends, families, and lovers into a public announcement. A confessional love letter, doused with perfume quietly placed beneath a paramour’s door is suddenly, non-consensually posted to the village’s notice board, and not just one village, but every village in the entire realm or the entire world.
That spell is current media technology and this theory is all about how its capabilities all but eliminate different contexts when it comes to our communication with others. Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd describe the flattening and removal of these different contexts as a “context collapse” where what used to me multiple audiences, are merged into one. Social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok take the previously clear lines between public and private, personal and communal, intimate and societal and obliterate them. As alluded to above, there was always the possibility that a private letter could be made public. Records of illicit affairs could be published, even self-published (e.g., The Reynolds Affair). Yet, the past few decades of social media’s development have both altered the way we think about our identities and the strategies we use to manage them.
You’re neither the first dungeonmaster nor the first player to be concerned about who else may be privy to your private communications. Neither are boyd and Marwick the first scholars to contemplate the power of technology to reduce the lines between different types of audiences. As televised political speeches became the norm, separations between in-person audience and those who would watch the event on their screens at home, or in a barber shop, or in a bar, were erased. Speakers who may have had a flair for in-person dramatics, altering language, cadence, tone, or delivery to align with different audiences suddenly found those audiences had become one-removing the ability to tailor performances to a homogeneous demographic. Imagine a Bard who no longer can know which audience is hearing her song. The sacred hymn she would have played to the paladins and the bawdy tavern song…also gets played to the paladins. The perfect casting of Friends also gets heard by those who were meant to hear Vicious Mockery. Context Collapse theory speaks to the kind of confusion, challenge, and chaos that results from unintended audiences (or unexpected audiences) hearing our messages. Further, for those individuals who are ineffective, inexperienced, or otherwise challenged in performing multiple identities in-person and via technology, this can be additionally destructive.
In many of our RPG fantasy worlds, the typical medieval-era level of technology limits some of the factors which make Context Collapse salient today. Barring the influence of magical means, or games which utilize a different standard for base-line technology (e.g., Cyberpunk Red), there is rarely a way for a message to exist permanently. In contrast to what we post online today, a letter in D&D can disappear, be lost, burnt, or hidden. Second, messages can’t be infinitely scaled up. Consider medieval scribes whose life’s work was the copying of a single book. Today a president’s tweet can be scaled immediately to reach every smartphone on the planet. Third, in the real world, messages are easily searchable on a host of web-crawling, Jeeves-asking, Alta-vista binging search engines. In D&D it’s usually at least a trip to a far-flung, musty research library. Fourth, for many social media sites, the user profile links content to an identifiable user, alongside other posts they’ve written, comments they’ve made, reviews they’ve composed, and reactions they’ve had. Networks connect those users together in clear, unambiguous, mappable ways. One user (and their content) can be studied in relation to others’ reactions, posts, and comments. The final technological capacity which facilitates Context Collapse is the stream. A never-ending flow of user-generated, algorithmically-processed and presented river of content selected precisely to keep each user using. Crucially for this theory, as contexts blend into a single mass, identity performance becomes more and more difficult.
To continue the medieval metaphor afforded to us by classic D&D, imagine a Bard whose songs are performed on a giant stage. Akin to posting her music on YouTube, she sings and plays her heart out to the assembled crowd. However, unlike in Shakespeare’s day, this stage has no borders, no backstage, and no wings. The Bard can’t see or know who is listening to her performance until they reveal themselves to her by posting a comment, which many never will. In our world of social media, much of our audience remains invisible to us so long as they wish. Thus, the Bard must imagine them, which may not accurately represent the actual audience listening to the performance. This may lead the Bard to adopt a variety of strategies to navigate this imagined audience.
First, she might self-censor. She might change her songs and performances to be more tailored to the audience she thinks might be there. She makes a song palatable to all, because all could be listening. She might carefully monitor the responses, comments, feedback, likes, dislikes, and subscription notifications to assess the support people show for the identity she’s performing. Third, she could offer a whole variety of songs, from the sacred hymn to the sultry dance number. Finally, she might encode into her lyrics more subtle cues, allusions, and signals (dog whistles) which specific audiences would hear and understand, but that most casual listeners would miss.
While more of a challenge, it is possible to at least partially re-create the boundaries social media technology has collapsed. A private concert just for the local nobles might be one way to ensure that the village rebels don’t learn of your support for the aristocracy. When it comes to social media, limited connections, blocking, and unfriending are all valid means of limiting the scope of your mediated connections. Next, the pen name, the pseudonym, and The Traveling Wilburys all offer a way for the privacy once afforded by a backstage performance to exist in a social media world. Perhaps we might even utilize the facilities of some social media platforms to make authentic, anonymous, comments. Snapchat’s messages disappear quickly (unless they are screenshot) and Reddit’s user handles are typically anonymized.
Private messages may not stay private and trust may be broken, but the potential to inflect into your rpg game some of the context collapsing elements of social media may turn an otherwise mundane conflict into one your players struggle to control, respond to, and ultimately best. What would happen if the players entered a new town only to find a magically-reappearing Wanted poster for their own arrest prominently displayed? What about a rumor about the Bard’s love for the corrupt nobles which cannot be stopped, countered, or kept from the ears of everyone in town? The destructive power of social media can be just as destructive in your fantasy world.
That spell is current media technology and this theory is all about how its capabilities all but eliminate different contexts when it comes to our communication with others. Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd describe the flattening and removal of these different contexts as a “context collapse” where what used to me multiple audiences, are merged into one. Social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok take the previously clear lines between public and private, personal and communal, intimate and societal and obliterate them. As alluded to above, there was always the possibility that a private letter could be made public. Records of illicit affairs could be published, even self-published (e.g., The Reynolds Affair). Yet, the past few decades of social media’s development have both altered the way we think about our identities and the strategies we use to manage them.
You’re neither the first dungeonmaster nor the first player to be concerned about who else may be privy to your private communications. Neither are boyd and Marwick the first scholars to contemplate the power of technology to reduce the lines between different types of audiences. As televised political speeches became the norm, separations between in-person audience and those who would watch the event on their screens at home, or in a barber shop, or in a bar, were erased. Speakers who may have had a flair for in-person dramatics, altering language, cadence, tone, or delivery to align with different audiences suddenly found those audiences had become one-removing the ability to tailor performances to a homogeneous demographic. Imagine a Bard who no longer can know which audience is hearing her song. The sacred hymn she would have played to the paladins and the bawdy tavern song…also gets played to the paladins. The perfect casting of Friends also gets heard by those who were meant to hear Vicious Mockery. Context Collapse theory speaks to the kind of confusion, challenge, and chaos that results from unintended audiences (or unexpected audiences) hearing our messages. Further, for those individuals who are ineffective, inexperienced, or otherwise challenged in performing multiple identities in-person and via technology, this can be additionally destructive.
In many of our RPG fantasy worlds, the typical medieval-era level of technology limits some of the factors which make Context Collapse salient today. Barring the influence of magical means, or games which utilize a different standard for base-line technology (e.g., Cyberpunk Red), there is rarely a way for a message to exist permanently. In contrast to what we post online today, a letter in D&D can disappear, be lost, burnt, or hidden. Second, messages can’t be infinitely scaled up. Consider medieval scribes whose life’s work was the copying of a single book. Today a president’s tweet can be scaled immediately to reach every smartphone on the planet. Third, in the real world, messages are easily searchable on a host of web-crawling, Jeeves-asking, Alta-vista binging search engines. In D&D it’s usually at least a trip to a far-flung, musty research library. Fourth, for many social media sites, the user profile links content to an identifiable user, alongside other posts they’ve written, comments they’ve made, reviews they’ve composed, and reactions they’ve had. Networks connect those users together in clear, unambiguous, mappable ways. One user (and their content) can be studied in relation to others’ reactions, posts, and comments. The final technological capacity which facilitates Context Collapse is the stream. A never-ending flow of user-generated, algorithmically-processed and presented river of content selected precisely to keep each user using. Crucially for this theory, as contexts blend into a single mass, identity performance becomes more and more difficult.
To continue the medieval metaphor afforded to us by classic D&D, imagine a Bard whose songs are performed on a giant stage. Akin to posting her music on YouTube, she sings and plays her heart out to the assembled crowd. However, unlike in Shakespeare’s day, this stage has no borders, no backstage, and no wings. The Bard can’t see or know who is listening to her performance until they reveal themselves to her by posting a comment, which many never will. In our world of social media, much of our audience remains invisible to us so long as they wish. Thus, the Bard must imagine them, which may not accurately represent the actual audience listening to the performance. This may lead the Bard to adopt a variety of strategies to navigate this imagined audience.
First, she might self-censor. She might change her songs and performances to be more tailored to the audience she thinks might be there. She makes a song palatable to all, because all could be listening. She might carefully monitor the responses, comments, feedback, likes, dislikes, and subscription notifications to assess the support people show for the identity she’s performing. Third, she could offer a whole variety of songs, from the sacred hymn to the sultry dance number. Finally, she might encode into her lyrics more subtle cues, allusions, and signals (dog whistles) which specific audiences would hear and understand, but that most casual listeners would miss.
While more of a challenge, it is possible to at least partially re-create the boundaries social media technology has collapsed. A private concert just for the local nobles might be one way to ensure that the village rebels don’t learn of your support for the aristocracy. When it comes to social media, limited connections, blocking, and unfriending are all valid means of limiting the scope of your mediated connections. Next, the pen name, the pseudonym, and The Traveling Wilburys all offer a way for the privacy once afforded by a backstage performance to exist in a social media world. Perhaps we might even utilize the facilities of some social media platforms to make authentic, anonymous, comments. Snapchat’s messages disappear quickly (unless they are screenshot) and Reddit’s user handles are typically anonymized.
Private messages may not stay private and trust may be broken, but the potential to inflect into your rpg game some of the context collapsing elements of social media may turn an otherwise mundane conflict into one your players struggle to control, respond to, and ultimately best. What would happen if the players entered a new town only to find a magically-reappearing Wanted poster for their own arrest prominently displayed? What about a rumor about the Bard’s love for the corrupt nobles which cannot be stopped, countered, or kept from the ears of everyone in town? The destructive power of social media can be just as destructive in your fantasy world.
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