girl, the context!
Some brief and unrefined thoughts on social media and context collapse as it relates to The Discourse
Alternative title: “...so you hate waffles?”
Have you heard? Emily Sundberg thinks you're not a real writer. Everyone get mad!
Her recent article titled ‘The Machine in the Garden’ has sparked almost immediate discourse and outrage on this platform in ways that shocked me at first as a relatively new user. For a community of writers who themselves frequently dabble in what is basically short-form cultural critique wrapped in a bow (especially if it involves the culture on TikTok), folks got weirdly defensive once they were the ones beneath the magnifying glass. We like to be only playfully, ironically, tragically self-aware. We like hearing criticism that makes you go “OMG, I feel so called out!” and not, “...oh.” Fucks up the vibe.
The article appeared to me to be an examination of how the push towards monetization on Substack has led to a flattening of what it means to write for a living due to the emphasis of quantity over quality. Apparently, what I had actually read was a completely different essay decreeing that if you write listicles instead of hashtag #real literature then you ought to be drawn and quartered. Restacks of restacks and a wave of vague-posting have turned this discussion into a very funny game of telephone, and now everyone’s waxing poetic about how anyone can be a writer (true!), and not to let that mean ol’ Sundberg kill your dreams or something.
And that dynamic got me thinking.
This piece will be two-fold: a brief re-examination and–hopefully–clarification of what Emily’s original core critique was, and a potentially even more brief discussion of context collapse on social media and how it links back to Substack’s recent shift towards becoming, in some ways, Twitter-in-a-turtleneck.
Walk with me here.
The title ‘Machine in the Garden’ was part of what first caught my attention, an efficient indicator of who–or what–Sundberg’s essay describes. It evokes the imagery of a lush garden full of flowering native plants and long-growing grass being destroyed mercilessly by the cold metal blades of a lawnmower. All that is left has been sliced down to a uniform length.
It’s a bit dramatic, but it sets the tone. A machine. A robot. An algorithm.
The opening paragraph primes Sundberg’s audience to be thinking about the relationship between corporations and creative output on social media sites with mentions of the stock market and looking at brand events on Instagram (paraphrasing here, just go read the original article). But I imagine that this is not the part that seems to have lit at least half my Substack feed on fire.
The hot take that started it all?
“I realized that if you blacked out the names of many of the writers I come across on Substack today, I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.” —Emily Sundberg
Having sifted through at least twenty different posts with the same melodramatic “wallowing and rotting in my bed thinking about my girlhood” tone and subject matter, this quote resonated with me and seemingly many others. But for some, this hit a sore spot. If quoted out of context, people who might enjoy or even produce this kind of writing might interpret this as snobbery or eye-rolling (and maybe there’s a little of that sprinkled in there, at times). But more vigilant readers who consider the groundwork already laid by the title and opening paragraph will understand that this is more about how the transformation of writing into ‘content’ leads people to reach for whatever gets more eyes on your work and, in turn, drives profit margins. Less unique voices, more of the same thing with a slightly different coat of paint. I am once again thinking of TikTok and its myriad ‘aesthetics’ which are just pretty pictures of products you should own. Unlike Substack however, you generally aren’t being asked to pay money to see them. What we are witnessing in the form of the written word is a shallow performance of taste, because right now, taste is marketable.
Two things that drive Emily’s point home are the quote from Substack’s CEO and the site’s mission statement. Chris Best didn’t say that he wanted to help grow the amount of inspired writers in the world, he said, “We want to help massively grow the size of the market for great writing”. Substack’s mission isn’t to bring about a writing renaissance, it’s to build “a new economic engine for culture”. That should raise far more eyebrows than any perceived accusations of writing boring prose.
A market. An engine. That is what Substack–Substack the platform and corporation, not Substack the online community–thinks of your writing. And the problem is, many are letting their work become just that.
Now that we're clear on what was actually said here, I want to bring attention to a function of Substack's Notes system that I initially thought was really neat and convenient, then quickly realized was a bit of a double-edged sword: the ability to restack with a quote. Usually, seeing a particularly poignant quotation is what hooks me into reading a piece; it's what got me to read Emily’s article. But you know what else was happening in the notes? People using the function to twist her words into something else entirely. As previously stated, the majority of the discourse has become a game of telephone, spurred on by people reading a single sentence and deciding that they've basically read the whole thing. What immediately came to mind scrolling through the sea of angry comments was the concept of context collapse, which Wikipedia (I know, sorry) defines as follows:
“Context collapse "generally occurs when a surfeit of different audiences occupy the same space, and a piece of information intended for one audience finds its way to another" with that new audience's reaction being uncharitable and highly negative for failing to understand the original context.”
The application to mass media technology stems from Joshua Meyrowitz’s book ‘No Sense of Place’, published in 1985. While he applies the theory to television and radio, context collapse has in the modern day been used to describe what happens on social media.
(Over on Tumblr they like to say, “my post has breached containment”!)
When no one bothers to read the entire article, when people prefer to jump to conclusions because the rush of sudden anger is more exciting than forcing yourself to stop and think, you get an environment that feels a little more like Twitter: hostile, insulated, and feeding off of its own hostility because outrage drives the numbers up. It makes me wonder if part of the purpose of reformatting Substack to look more like the bird app (‘Notes’ even rhymes with ‘Quotes’) was to simply milk more engagement from its user base at the cost of more meaningful discourse and expression of thought. I mean, look at just how many notes and restacks Emily’s essay is receiving compared to some of the other works on your feed. Part of it is likely due to the length and quality of the piece, but a lot of it is also because of all the noise surrounding it.
I wouldn’t be surprised.
Consider again the emphasis on monetization in the article. If Emily's allegedly so mad about the fact that people she deems unqualified are writing on Substack, why not just focus on critiquing the quality of other users’ work? What has the influencer economy and the CEO of Substack got to do with it?
Because the essay isn't about lampooning people who write just to air out their thoughts. It isn't about people who just want to write for fun, or as a hobby. It isn't even really about using Substack as your personal diary.
It's about what happens when you turn your writing into an easily-reproduced product.
Now, let's all move on.