Retheorizing Context Collapse for Social Media

Context collapse—the flattening of multiple audience types into one on social media platforms—has been a crucial concept in social computing for over 15 years. It has been instrumental in informing and framing research, driving empirical experimentation, and shaping platform design interventions. However, the concept has not evolved alongside rapidly changing social media platforms and new forms of user engagement, and is itself conceptually ambiguous. In this paper, we retheorize context collapse by developing a grammar of its dimensions and potential applications for modern platforms. We introduce three dimensions of context for social media: the user, the platform, and the data/interaction. We then review well-known context collapses using our grammar and propose three novel examples of collapses on social media platforms. Our retheorization provides a necessary refresh of the concept of context collapse, aligning it with today’s social media platforms and offering a context grammar to enable more robust theorization and generative design potential.