Context Collapse
Combining things that shouldn't go together, like the 'items' on sale alongside my book
[Warning: While not exactly not safe for work, visually and verbally this instalment gets a bit spicier as it goes along.]
On a good day, I can simply say that I like to do lots of different things, and that’s fine. On a bad day, I probably need to call a spade a spade and confess that I am pathologically multifaceted, that there should be a diagnostic category to describe me, someone so multi-hyphenate that my first sensation on waking up in the morning is often a vague confusion about what my job actually is.
And it’s increasing. I’m excellent at adding, but I don’t subtract. I’m like a snowball rolling down the hill, unable to choose what it picks up and embeds into its body along the way. I collect hobbies, social contacts, passions, and whole professions, and it would take a multitude of lifetimes to properly contain them all.
Now, despite being a psychologist, and despite the fact that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has now expanded its labels to encompass virtually all of human experience, I don’t know the name for this malady. It’s not exactly workaholism; there are too many cheerfully endured flaws for it to be perfectionism; and I don’t come anywhere near meeting the criteria for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, although sometimes it feels like that. I’m not indecisive — on the contrary, I have definitively decided that I like everything I’m doing. I am terminally curious, chronically interested, fatally fascinated.
Yes, fatally, because some days, those aforementioned bad days, it feels like it might just kill me. But everybody has to die of something.
The other day I had a meeting with a new management agency, who’d analysed my current digital presence and how it could be better supporting my keynote speaking. They’d kindly done a SWOT analysis on me - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. Under ‘Weaknesses’ they’d written something like, ‘breadth of specialisms dilute her offering’ and another item that basically described me as incomprehensible. Without a clearer brand, a more distilled offering, they explained, I’ll never be as successful as I could have been.
Google me, and you’ll get a hot mess. The sociologist Michael Wesch was one of the first people to use the phrase ‘context collapse’ with reference to online content and online audiences. Context collapse happens when lots of different audiences are inhabiting the same space, and when information that you intend for one audience gets to loads of others as well.
That’s context collapse, and it’s the story of my life. The answer to the question ‘how do you do it all?’ is that I’m not as good a juggler as I used to be, and it turns out that when you describe yourself as a psychologist-coach-speaker-author-supervisor-storyteller-mentor-consultant-mediator-academic-podcast host, nobody knows what to do with you.
I know from both the advice I’m receiving and my own experience of overwhelm that I need to slim down and cut back. But the resistance is real.
Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s like hoarding, but with activities instead of objects. That sounds right.
Hoarding Disorder, diagnostic code F42.3. [Specifier: with excessive acquisition. Additional specifier: with good insight.]
If I’m worried about humans being confused — potential clients, audiences, readers — I should probably be just as worried about the algorithms and how they might further muddy the waters. My kid sent me a strange WhatsApp message from school the other day, a short snippet that described me.
‘Elaine Kasket is a British psychologist, author, and public speaker known for her work in the field of death, loss, and digital legacy,’ it said. ‘She has extensively researched and written about the psychological impact of technology on death and bereavement.’
I didn’t recognise this passage, but my daughter’s class had been working with ChatGPT that day, it turned out. It’s an elegantly simple if somewhat out-of-date description, easy to metabolise precisely because of all that it leaves out, the innumerable chaotic side hustles I was engaged in at that time. It’s gotten way more complicated since. The last update ChatGPT was trained on dates to September 2019, soon after the publication of my book about death and the digital. When OpenAI’s super-intelligent chatbot is trained on more recent information, I have no idea what it’s going to make of me, but I’ve got some indications, and they worry me.
I was spending a week at my favourite writing retreat in Devon, working on the third edit of my novel — the delicious pudding course after a large sensible nonfiction meal. Having taken a few moments out to check my emails, I saw that my marketing and publicity team at my publisher’s had been in touch — the listing on Amazon.co.uk for Reboot was up, they said, and looking good with all the fancy graphics. Great! I said. I’ll have a look.
I duly tapped the name of the book into the search box, followed by my surname, and hit return. Sure enough, in living colour and with a tantalising pre-order button, was my very own book. This item had competition, though: there were three other search results, neatly arranged in a line to the right of my book cover.
I blinked for a while, noticed my heart and stomach felt a bit funny, and wrote my marketing and publicity team an email.
Hey all, I said. Bit of a funny one. I just typed ‘reboot’ and ‘Kasket’ into Amazon. I’m curious if the same search results are coming up for you as they are for me. If you see what I’m seeing, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
A mere few minutes passed before I received a flurry of responses. OMG, yes. I can see what you mean.
I took a screenshot of the search results on that date, which have been modified in the story-letter to respect any readers who have delicate sensibilities in this department. For those of you listening on a podcast app rather than reading along on Substack, let me sort you out, so to speak.
Search result one: REBOOT: Reclaiming Your Life in a Tech-Obsessed World, by Elaine Kasket, £13.89 RRP, pre-order price guarantee, released August 31, 2023.
Search result two’s ‘comfortable to use powerful functions’ include a squeeze bulb, a long tube, and a flexible nozzle.
Search result three, retailing at £25.99 and available in the time it takes to ship to you from Germany, is a soft and flexible leisure item, waterproof and durable, with a strong suction cup, enabling you to enjoy it in any situation where you have a flat, fixed surface to which you can attach it securely. Measurements aren't shown unless you click the listing (which I did not), but from eyeballing it I’d estimate it at roughly seven inches, rendering it a leisure item that is not for the faint-hearted.
Search result four, which is a slightly larger version of search result three and identified as being ‘suitable for men’, is a rather more premium item, its greater expense perhaps related to the quality of the materials used to attach it around the user’s waist. At £48, you can expect softness, skin friendliness, and an ergonomic design, not to mention being exceptionally true to life. (A caveat: this latter point is not in the Amazon product description but based on my own life experience and observations.)
My marketing and publicity team were all aflutter, and not for the reasons you might think. First, no one could work out why it was happening. What might we not have realised about the meaning of my surname in Germany, or the subcultural connotations of the word ‘reboot’? At this early stage in the listing’s life, with not very much information to go on, were the algorithms simply making the best possible guess about what else went into this category, but why would the ‘best possible guess’ be, well, this?
One of the team put forth a tentative hypothesis. Could it be the category that the book is under? she asked. Practical & motivational self help?
While it might certainly be true for some that these items - as we came to refer to them - are practical, motivational, and helpful, it seemed unlikely that this was the explanation. Some cold comfort was offered, that day, by the fact that when we put my whole name in the search box, these items didn’t appear, and that was a relief. It was also suggested, by those in the know about these things, that after a short period of time it was likely that the algorithms would sort it out.
And indeed, it’s proven to be the case. Today I put ‘reboot kasket’ into the Amazon.co.uk search box, and although there was one item that featured 12 silent but powerful vibration patterns, most of the rest of the search results were books that were in roughly in the same category as mine.
I told my friend, a coffee shop owner, about the incident. He used to be in branding, and incredibly, guessed what these items were merely from my demeanour when I started to tell the story. I told him about my fears - one of which was that people would think that this was a form of context collapse, that perhaps I was involved in other worlds that were spilling over, so to speak, onto my Amazon author page. He suggested that I should roll with it. He introduced me to one of his new baristas by saying, ‘This is Elaine. She sells dildos with her books.’
‘No, no, Tim,’ I said, collapsing misery and mischief into one. ‘I sell books with my dildos.’
But no, for once, the utter bizarreness in those initial search results wasn’t anything to do with my plethora of activities — I swear, Your Honour. But the incident happened at a moment when I was seriously confronting the consequences of being all over the place for so long, and considering the wisdom of cleaning house.
If I don’t, at best, I’ll be seen as jack of all trades and master of none. At worst - and apologies in advance for this - there will be far more instances of getting buggered by the algorithms.