It’s October of 2018. I’m moving to the rural fringes of my college town, and I’m anxious. I brace myself for lawns adorned with confederate flags and Trump memorabilia. I have imaginary dialogues with bible-thumping, gun-toting neighbors who would likely peg me, at first glimpse, as a liberal “snowflake.” I feel as though I’m venturing into a saturated sea of my dislikes. Little did I know that my constellation of dislikes would become a home place that challenged my very understanding of who constitutes an “us” and a “them,” and ultimately repaired my context-eclipsing perspective by re-siting my sense of belonging as a way of being alongside others.
Before repair, though, there was wounding. We’re two years into the Trump presidency, and my social media presence at this time—I know I’m not alone here—is akin to throwing small pieces of flammable debris on an already raging dumpster fire. Every tweet, self-righteous Facebook post, just-so-you-know share, or baited/baiting reply is as impactful as it is brief: a momentary flash of orange flames settling into monolithic ash for eternity. The usefulness of my tweets, posts, shares, and likes, then, is not so much to secure my own proof of being on the right side of history more than it’s to feed the insatiable appetite of something bigger and less human–and what if I told you that something is actually non-thing (Han)? How can we find and disrupt that which has no clear beginning, end, materiality, or sitedness?
That non-thing I’m referring to is what Odell calls “contextual monoculture,” a central characteristic of social media that freezes and flattens complex ecologies of contexts—rendering two-dimensional the myriad bodies, objects, spaces, places, and relationships that shape our understanding of ourselves and others, as well as the possibility-laden landscapes in-between. Such landscapes are not only the constitutive sites we inhabit but the overlaps, entanglements, reciprocities, and agentive thresholds between those sites: in other words, the dialogic periphery between ecologies of contexts across time and space. Odell refers to these siting/sited landscapes as “bioregions,” which are sustained by “not only familiarity with the local ecology but a commitment to stewarding it together” (xviii). Yet, the flattening axis of “contextual monoculture” collapses the relational component of our bioregions, and fuels—like feeding refuse to a dumpster fire—overly simplistic factionalism. And overly simplistic factionalism disintegrates our agency in the attention economy. The more our social media habits excise context from content, reducing the ways we encounter and make meaning to a simple “us versus them” framework, the more our sited senses become atrophied. We will no longer have the ability to see, listen to, and attend to a world—and its constellated interdependencies—in dire need of repair.
But how did we allow this large scale collapse of context? Wasn’t social media supposed to be a bastion of hope—a space for organization, dialogue, and resistance? Perhaps social media was doomed when our discursive options became more and more limited by character counts, trend-chasing hashtags, and the eclipsing creep of a like versus dislike framework. The latter is particularly malignant because it bifurcates how we engage in dialogue, providing us with only two possible responses, both of which require a significant collapse of context. Odell argues that “context collapse” is not only leveling of space, but also time. This is especially glaring on social media, where a drive for instantaneous response “flattens past, present, and future into a constant, amnesiac present” (173), wherein we do not have the space or time to unpack the highly concentrated information we receive (only to like or dislike it)–nor to engage in the sort of longform dialogue required to forge lasting community ties and work towards consensus. But there’s an inner dimension, too: As Odell writes, social media’s “persuasive design collapses context within our very thought processes themselves by assuming we should share our thoughts right now” (173). Thus, our collective cries into the public void of social media do not necessitate listening, but drown one another out.
I was drowning that fall when I moved to the country. My perception was highly saturated by what I liked: not Trump, not conservatives, not any symbolism linked to conservatism, not half the people in the US, who were distorted by social media into a nameless, faceless monolith much like myself. I dreaded putting down roots in the land of my dislikes precisely because the like versus dislike framework had crept into the very way I was able to perceive and encounter others in their non-avatar, material forms. Yet, with each new encounter with a neighbor, across generous spans of time–days, weeks, months–slowly chipped away at that two-sided, self-other monolith that social media conveniently turned from mirage into mode of seeing. For instance, there was the couple who I bonded with over a shared concern: the burgeoning feral cat population in our neighborhood that needed dire attention. Through the dialogue, strategies, and actions sparked by that relationship, we were able to ensure a safer, healthier life for those cats and the delicate ecological balance impacted by them. Then there were the neighbors who, during a particularly brutal ice storm that caused a black out, invited us over to their generator-powered home for tea, warmth, and running water. We helped these same neighbors by caring for their livestock and pets when they were out of town, lighting a spark that eventually led to us getting our own small flock of chickens–an act that has further pulled my attention away from screen-based, 2-D contexts and towards the living, breathing, deeply interdependent material world around me.
It’s now been five years of real time in our new home, during which we’ve forged a constellation of relationships with our human and nonhuman neighbors–networks of community that would never be able to take root within clickbait-favoring frames of “like versus dislike” or “us versus them.” Such frameworks are sustained with brief snippets of information: the detritus of collapsing contexts tossed like chunks of coal into a hungry, raging fire.
Two weeks ago, a real fire raged on the periphery of our neighborhood, lighting up the mountain across the river from us like a neon orange crown. It was more real to me than any wildfire I’d gawked at online; and troublingly, for that reason, it felt utterly surreal. I was haunted by a realization: had I not spent time putting down and nourishing roots beyond my looking glass of “likes,” I’d have never known the concerned neighbors who reached out to us about the fire, sharing photos, updates, and advice for handling the dense smoke hanging over our yards. I’d also have never encountered, at least not yet, in a local, material way, the destructive periphery of climate change further creeping into our bioregions. I’d have never witnessed how, in response to a crisis, it’s local networks of resilience–composed, in part, of those rendered unlikable in social media spaces–that face destruction head-on, with an unflinching grit that can only manifest through material community ties.
In the end, my move to the country was the painful uprooting I never knew I needed. It allowed me to reroot beyond the context-collapsing frames of social media, enabling me to attend to the relationships vital to self, other, and whole-world repair. As Jackson writes, “attention to maintenance and repair may help to redirect our gaze from moments of production to moments of sustainability and the myriad forms of activity by which the shape, standing, and meaning of objects in the world is produced and sustained—a feature especially valuable in a field too often occupied with the shock of the new” (234). True repair requires the very elements collapsed by social media’s dialogic frames: ecologies that anchor us in time, place, and nourishing relation to one another.
Works Cited:
Han, Byung-Chul. Non-things. Polity Press, 2022.
Jackson, Steven J. “Rethinking Repair.” Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, et al., The MIT Press, 2014, pp. 221-39.l
Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing. Brooklyn, Melville House Publishing, 2019.
