I finally have a label for what I’ve been working so hard to avoid for the past twenty years. Context collapse. Of course I’ve read blogs, and use Facebook, and Twitter, and have established an identity of sorts in various online forums and in various online classes for a good twenty years. But I never ventured into any of this before figuring out how to avoid context collapse. My figurative Aunt Harriet has never met my students online, and my students are very unlikely to have met me online before we encounter one another in the classroom or online. And my students certainly don’t know the many lovely quirks of my figurative Aunt Harriet. At times it has been very tricky to hide from Aunt Harriet or from my students in various places, but I think I have more or less done it. Just yesterday, one of my siblings brought up an episode from our early childhood in which our father was bayoneted by a member of the National Guard while working as a journalist during a campus protest in the late 60s. We all reflected on this experience in a fairly public forum; but I don’t expect that my students would find this, and I wouldn’t really want them to. It’s not that I’d never ever mention it to a student if it were relevant for some reason, but it would feel very strange to me for people I have not yet met to have already encountered this little part of my autobiography. So, context collapse, I guess that’s what I’ve been avoiding all these years.
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Hi Barbara,
I’m not sure how I feel about context collapse. I have a Facebook account, but I have never posted anything to it. Thus my photos have all been posted by people other than me. I like when students are interested enough to find out something kind of personal about me. It’s a little easier for me to “hide” some parts of my past (I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, so it is not likely that students or even other faculty would know people I know from high school; my husband and kids have a different last name than I do and (so far) I am proud of the choices they (and I) have made both in real life and online; I have had 2 different academic careers in my life and those don’t seem to intersect much, for whatever reason. Two places where I become nervous about Context Collapse are politics (my own vs. colleagues’ and students’) and privilege differences. I pretty much avoid discussions of politics in open forums or face-to-face interactions if I do not know the person well AND know that the person has similar political views. Regarding privilege and power issues, those are harder to ignore, harder to address and yet more important to address in academic settings.
Hi Maggie – Thanks for your reply and for sharing your thoughts about context collapse. I am from southern Iowa, so like you people from my past rarely find people from my present. I find your thinking about your kids’ and husband’s online presence interesting. I’m suddenly realizing that I have spent the past few years teaching my teenager to avoid context collapse in his own online presence. Now I’m suddenly not entirely sure whether this is a good thing!