An essay version of the video is below – not just a transcript but a text that I’ve rewritten thoroughly to work as text.
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Overview #
Why do jokes fall flat online? Why is it so easy to get into trouble by saying something you thought was fine, but others found offensive?
Turns out this is because of a basic feature of how these social media networks work.
Video #
Audio #
Why is social media so humourless?
Download audio
Context collapse in social media #
Have you ever made a joke on Facebook, or some other social media site only for land like a lead balloon?
It might have worked for your friends – your pre-existing circle on social media – but as soon as somebody re-posted it or boosted it out
of your circle, somebody utterly humourless reacted badly and didn’t get the joke. They got offended and angry about silliness merely existing.
There’s a reason for that, and it goes to the root of most of what’s wrong with social media.
Not everything that’s wrong, but it is one of
the core problems, especially in short textual
As I’ve been getting into doing videos and podcast episodes
and thinking about the role that social media plays in my media landscape and my contributions to that landscape, I’ve been revisiting some of the research I studied and read about in the past.
And it turns out there are reasons why
the social media experience is so toxic for so
I addressed many of the
issues that affect TikTok and other
short-form video. It gives you
the impression of an argument as opposed
to letting an argument unfold.
by the duration, by the screen size,
limit the level of detail you
can deliver in a video, which affects the argument
they can deliver. This obviously is not great, since this is where much of our
political discourse is taking place. But short-form textual
social media – the ones that are all
modelled after
Twitter – aren’t much of a positive influence either.
have a lock on the journalistic
class, the political class, and on
quite a bit of academic research. People of influence
tend to disproportionately get their information
from these networks. Whereas the public tends to get them from videos – short and long.
They are the first step in for modern information distribution.
An academic who wants to promote their paper will start by posting about it on X, or Bluesky, or Mastodon.
Politicians make their announcements and commentary on X and then on video.
Reporters rely on these sites to discover news and scoops.
These social media networks all have the issue
where you can quite easily ruin your
entire career – or at least your day –
by saying something completely and perfectly innocuous that gets
interpreted by somebody else as offensive.
Sometimes these things are offensive, but
you’re used to voicing them in
a more forgiving environment. So when you switch
to social media, you don’t
adjust your language and tone. You
don’t code-switch. You don’t change
your vocabulary and approach to suit a more public audience.
You might not even be aware that a more public audience was possible. Most of us only have our few followers and friends and people rarely notice our nonsense. But sometimes people do notice and it’s rarely pleasant.
There’s a name for this: context collapse.
sociologist and psychologist Erving
Goffman, but I
personally first encountered it in the papers,
essays, and talks, and books by danah
boyd who
is one of the
leading academics on social media –
especially the social media use
And the way that she describes context collapse is that, before, you’d have distinct spheres of social interaction – the high school
hallway social interaction for students, the
classroom interactions, the family interactions – each of these would
have a different language, different vocabulary and
different approaches. They would have different expectations for what’s
right and what’s wrong, what’s healthy, and
what’s unhealthy. What makes the other people
in a context angry and what doesn’t.
What social media does is collapse all these contexts into one, so
you now have to keep track of half a dozen different environments
in your head when you’re writing online.
Any one of these contexts could find
your discourse offensive.
This is particularly obvious with humour because jokes require an understanding of the audience and its expectations, because playing with expectations is what
makes a joke funny. If your audience is
completely different from what you expected, the
joke is gonna fall flat or even
But this also effects normal discussions about
topics that are important to our media
landscape, our culture, and our politics. Like how we talk about
Reading is important, as you can
tell from the fact that a
text-based social media remains to this
day the
first line of information distribution over
video. So reading is
quite important and the media loves to debate declines or changes in literacy.
when we talk about reading on
a social media network,
there’s a limit to how much context
we can provide. There’s a limit to how much additional text we can include in each post to define which kind of reading we’re
talking and what context we’re coming from. The length limits of the text exacerbates the context collapse.
When you try and discuss the various distinct features of
audiobooks, print books, and ebooks
what you have to say immediately gets mired in multiple different
that
there are snobs who try and
elevate print over everything else. They
are trying to exclude other media, especially the kind that they feel is making books
too accessible, such as ebooks or audiobooks.
Conversely, designers and typographers who are
trying to deliver the best
designed
textual reading experience
need to be able to discuss the needs of each form without reservation.
When somebody wades into the online
discourse and says something like
“audiobooks aren’t reading,” both of those contexts – design and elitism – collapse into the same social sphere.
There is no distinguishing between the
two. The designer, in saying this, might be making the point that audiobooks require
very different considerations and very different engineering sensibilities
such as acoustic design. They require
things that just don’t exist in
print. Print conversely requires a level of
design and thought to the
binding, paper, and the
kind of ink. All of which are considerations that don’t make any sense in the context of an ebook.
The discourse of a designer trying to talk
about the distinction between these, is collapsed with the discourse of the
snobs who want to alienate entire sectors
of society from reading. Everybody gets ganged upon for making an argument
that they aren’t actually making. Because the context has
collapsed. The designer get shouted
at for being a snob. Or they get
supported by
the snobs because they think the designer
is talking about the elevation
actually say any such thing. They just
didn’t have the space in three hundred
characters to highlight the specific context of the print form.
These contexts are forced
to exist within the same space and this makes nuanced discourse impossible.
It makes arguments and conflict inevitable. It
degrades our ability to discuss important topics. The all-encompassing nature of social media degrades
our ability to surface specialisation and
knowledge from
academia and experts. Their contributions are cut off
right out of the gate, because textual social media is where information starts its journey to disseminate out into
This context collapse destroys any
possible discourse before it starts spreading. We have crippled our
ability to talk properly about
society, the world around us, and understand
the environment that we live
remain the spaces that academia, politicians, and experts are using to convey their ideas and as long as it’s only space that reporters and journalists really
pay attention to,
we will be held back by
this mush that it turns our
The only recourse we have as individuals is to be less reliant on these platforms and switch to other forms of discovering
information and knowledge. RSS feeds, trusted websites,
or anything really that delivers longer
texts, audio, and video and, more importantly, is siloed into separate contexts.
We need specialised pages that follow each
topic and give it the detail
and nuance it needs without worrying
about outsiders misunderstanding it, and then attacking
it for offending them in a way that was not intended at all.
We need to be careful about our reliance on social media. Not just because of the mental health
issues – there’s a lot of
emphasis on the anxiety
and mental health ramifications of
extensive social media use.
One of the bigger problems
with the dominance of social media is
that it distorts our understanding of the
world around us. It changes
what we see, what we hear, and
what we read in ways that
diminishes our understanding of the world. It makes it harder for us
to constructively respond to crises.
Try and spend less time on
Bluesky or Mastodon, and just leave X entirely. No good comes from X. It’s just going to give you bad ideas.
Find a few good websites or podcasts and
follow them on the topics you’re
interested in. Read those. Don’t rely
on search engines or social media
to get the get your information.
Try to let the nuance of specialisation exist without attacking
It’s kind of the only way
we can go forward from here.
