Thought Trains

 

On sorting through high and low contexts.

High and low context was one of the main points in anthropologist Edward Hall's book Beyond Culture, and I frequently come back to it. The Smith Slap was high context in some ways, but mostly low context.

 

 

What you're seeing is a clip or frame without the other things around it (at least initially). It's like fragments of overheard conversations in a bar or restaurant after 9/11 where all you heard was some triggering phrase and your mind would start making inferences and connecting dots, when in fact the provisional pattern that the dots made showed nothing. We assemble things in bits and fragments and spotlight certain things based on our brain state and attention level at the time. (This is what dreams are to some degree: emotional moments in "movies" scored just-so with the most appropriate music). 

I always had the greatest ideas while traveling on trains because of the combination of motion and looking out the window. On one occasion, there were two (what I presumed to be) strangers having an intimate, but a clearly audible public conversation. She was talking about grieving the loss of her husband over a year ago, apparently from a heart attack at age 35: "I just didn't see it coming--he was always in the best of shape..." "...you know people say you can get over it in a year--well it just doesn't happen that way...I was numb for the first few months..." But perhaps I didn't have the whole story--they were just fragments. Perhaps they knew each other more deeply and hadn't seen each other in years and there was a serendipitous meeting on a train, or perhaps there was a connection on some other level, such as a sibling having a relationship with a sibling of the other person. What was interesting was that it was a performance, and it compelled you to listen and feel empathy. In films or novels, contexts are book-ended between contrived beginnings and endings. In order to learn more about those worlds they have to continually be revised or serialized by adding more fragments and connective tissue.

When I recall the dialog on the train it conjures that "film". For writers, this is grist for the creative process, which creates more high context through abstractions from real-life events.

What happened at the Academy Awards was a recursive performance: people acting in movies acting out in a meta-performance. That's initially why you think it's a gag because the mental model is that films are artifice and the people involved in the artifice industry will naturally do that kind of thing (high context). But like the fatal heart attack at age 35, you didn't see it coming, and it breaks the fourth wall between life as a show and life happening sequentially over time sans intentional narrative. Most of reality is low context because everything seems diffuse and disconnected, so that's why we make high context--to give it some kind of form that people learn through contrived narratives, even if it's not true or useful at the individual level. At least it clears the water.

The characteristic of low context is that everything needs analysis and explanation, and there is a tsunami of it in this case.