I’ve felt this for years (blogs have global context): “The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts. There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.”
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Many years ago, in the early days of YouTube, I created a web show that involved three young women in NYC sitting around a table and talking about their week — working, dating, partying, struggling, thriving. I cut it into 5-minute clips and released it as a daily series. It did really well, and I like to think, presaged several formats that would later appear when social media arrived.
One day, Metafilter found it. They tore apart the girls for their attitudes, their vocal fry, their style, their posture — everything. I remember staring at the screen and thinking, "You know, this wasn't made FOR YOU, right?"
That feeling is now alien. Everything is FOR YOU.
I still think about this massive unnoticed change all the time. For those of us old enough to remember pre-internet (or even pre-social internet), there was a time that you recognized something was "for you" and "not for you." The internet flattened everything, made every event something YOU should form an opinion about.
The uni-context is now reality. There is no context outside the uni-context.
Very compelling. Could have mind-blowing implications. I like that Callard doesn’t rush to place value judgements on the uni-context. Its implications, and our seeming preference for it, could be so profound as to defy value judgements, or even void them altogether. Our preference for it might be like our preference for not being killed, or not being cheated: almost self-evident, and usually not treated as a relevant object for value judgement.
So much to chew on with this, but a few details stood out immediately:
Do our shared sources of fear and anger really overpower our shared sources of happiness and contentment? Some part of me resists that, although I can’t say it’s untrue.
I guess one upside is that, if it’s true, it provides a relatively humane explanation for our apparent obsession with baity negativity. It suggests that if troubling shit proliferates in our feeds, that’s not because we all just love thumbing through nastiness, but because nastiness commands bigger audiences, due to the breadth of our sources of happiness. Happiness is just harder to communicate and takes more time to contextualise. If true, this would be a big relief.
Also, the description of attention management in the 19th century doesn’t ring true to me, even though the underlying point might be strong. For example, 19th-century humans wrote novels, by hand, inhabiting and constructing fictional contexts for extended periods, with many associated time-demands... meaning they (or at least some of them) would have had to learn to concentrate. But this slightly flawed comparison actually strengthens the point being made about the uni-context, in my view. It opens up the possibility that uni-contextuality could have emerged even earlier than described. It may have started with the printing press, for example, or even before that, with the told tale. Perhaps it came about through language itself, or maybe earlier still, with the basic attention-sequestering capabilities that underlie all communication. Does our need for the uni-context explain our love of independence and freedom, qualities that allow us to range beyond our immediate contexts? We have a rough idea that the more cognitively capable among our fellow animals, when kept captive, are also more likely to try and escape (eg, octopi)... is that a manifestation of their own yearning for a uni-context?
What I feel I need now are tips for navigating the uni-context. If it really is an inevitability arising from human nature, and if it’s now boiling over because we’re having to learn how to govern ourselves as a planetary population, then I could definitely use some ideas for how to cope. I wouldn’t be surprised if Callard is already thinking along these lines. I’ll definitely be following her work as it develops.
There is something fishy about this concept, and for me it has something to do with Callard's assertion about the inevitability of it. The one that particularly stuck in my craw is the claimed inevitability of negative bias because of its global universality. To me, this completely ignores the equally global truth of the universality of certain forms of good: respect, civility, kindness, compassion. To claim that negative bias abounds because it alone is universally recognizable holds little water for me in the face of the truth that everyone on the planet (except maybe for sociopaths) responds positively to being treated well. The truth for me is that negative bias abounds internationally because it is *easier* to (1) behave in a negative fashion and not immediatley suffer or not recognize the negative consequences and (2) blame the negative circumstances around me for the unfortunate contexts (locally and globally) that we find ourselves in. It is hard -- hard, hard, hard -- to live a virtuous life and the evidence abounds that fewer and fewer people are choosing to make the effort. That does not make it inevitable, any more than the "uni-context" as conceived by Callard is pre-ordained. It is simply the sum of the accumulated weight of a global population that finds it less arduous to live passively or negatively than make the effort required to behave in a more positive manner.
Yeah, I thought the idea of the uni-context was interesting, but some of her and her interlocutor's conclusions were of the confirmation of priors variety.
I don't think she's actually saying that negative bias is inevitable, she's saying that it survives cross-contextual communication more easily than positive bias (specifically because communicating a positive bias requires a more detailed understanding of its specific context). I don't necessarily agree with the conceptualisation, but I don't think she's arguing that negativity is inevitable, just that it's easier for it to cross contexts (a much less ambitious claim).
Also, I don't think she's necessarily addressing close interpersonal relationships in which we treat one another with varying levels of goodness, because these relationships are likely to occur within diverse contexts. Instead, I suspect she's addressing relationships that occur within massive, merged contexts (ie more like social media comments, less like neighbourly banter). While I'm still unsure whether her conceptualisation holds, I can definitely see glimmers of evidence. For example, not just in the prevalence of negativity in uni-contexts, but also in the shallowness and homogeneity of much of the positive content that does spread widely through uni-contexts (eg, baby-focused content seems to thrive, regardless of the species of baby).
Also, I'd challenge this, and caution against using it as a basic ethical principle:
Certainly, it can be hard to live a virtuous life. Difficulty can even be said to enhance virtue (ie, the same virtuous act can be deemed more virtuous if it's harder to carry out). Often, virtue will necessitate sacrificing one's own wants and needs to favour others. Sometimes it will even necessitate that one suffers. But is it a precondition, that virtue be difficult? I highly doubt that. Once a species has the capability to manage its resource consumption to the degree that we can, it's absolutely worth asking how we structure that resource management. What do we expect it to incentivise? What do we expect it to make easy? We're unlikely to be able to make living virtuously fully easy but can't we make it easier? Can we structure our economies and governance to reward more virtue, at least, than they do now?
In my view, we absolutely can. But, to get better at being virtuous as a species, it's very important that we don't fall for this idea that virtue must always be hard (or even -- hard, hard, hard). This is a sneaky Christian pseudo-virtue that's gradually wormed its way deep down into many societies' basic moral calculi, by convincing people that they can't expect a life of virtue to be easy or rewarding. Christians love tying virtue to suffering, it's baked into their theology (the greatest act a god could ever carry out being sending his offspring to experience the nobility of human suffering). This impulse has embedded itself so deeply in Christian societies that you can still find it at work long after Christ himself has faded from popularity; for example, the way many British people approach discussions about social welfare carries this assumption that there's inherent virtue in strife.
I like Callard's theory because it offers a behavioural rather than a moral explanation for many of our current woes. It tries to examine how a species with particularly high cognitive and social capabilities, a creature extremely skilled at creating contexts (but also one that craves widening those contexts), will react when forced to apply its cognitive capabilities across larger and more complicated contexts of its own creation. Ie, we're animals, and like any other animal we sometimes adapt our behaviour in ways that unwittingly harm us. If people are becoming less virtuous, and if this is happening because we've adapted our behaviour to disincentivise virtue, then we ought to examine and react to this without making blanket condemnations and simply commanding everyone to do better. If the systems that govern our behaviour are failing us, the best approach would be to address the systems where we can, and where we can't, to learn how to deal with their unintended consequences in virtuous ways.
As for confirmations of priors, I detected some of that in Thompson's questioning but not in Callard's answers. She tended to set him straight. But I might have missed something, because this stuff is very abstract and ties my brain in knots. I'd appreciate it if someone could point out any question-begging that I've missed.
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