Short-form Content Makes You Ever More Alone

Your experience is a mix of content size and context size.

Consider this classic art piece, Duchamp’s “Fountain”. It’s just a urinal. The content is a Urinal. Devoid of context, that’s all it is.

What made it art was that there was a large shared context: A debate about what was art, and in that context Duchamp’s piece said some profound things. And everyone in that discourse at the time (the context) understood it.

See, what you experience is a combination of the content and your context that you interpret the content with.

Consider this equation:

Experience = (Shared Content) + (Personal Context)

When the Shared Content is minuscule—a 15-second clip, a 280-character thought—it acts as little more than an inkblot. The video is a trigger, but the meaning, the interpretation, the emotional reaction—that is almost entirely supplied by you. Your personal context, a compressed archive of every experience you’ve ever had, rushes in to fill the vacuum. The shared part of the experience is trivially small.

This is why two people can see the same post and have wildly different, often opposing, reactions. They aren’t really experiencing the same thing. They are each having a deeply personal experience in the presence of a minor, shared stimulus.

Longer content flips the ratio. When you and I both read a 400-page book or watch a two-hour film, the Shared Content is massive. The characters, the plot, the detailed world—this forms a substantial, common foundation. Our personal contexts still color our interpretations, but they are layered on top of a vast, shared landscape. The content itself becomes the context. We have more to talk about because we actually experienced more of the same thing.

It Compounds:

Here is the feedback loop: Each time you interpret a piece of short content, your personal context is reinforced and refined. The algorithm notices. It feeds you another inkblot that seems to resonate with the unique meaning you just created. This new experience, also dominated by your personal context, refines your perspective further.

Your context becomes a more potent and unique lens.

Each experience becomes more personal.

You drift deeper into a filter bubble of one.

This is a quiet atomization. We are not just being sorted into political tribes. We are being spun into individual realities, each with its own history and logic. Our shared world shrinks, not because we lack information, but because we lack shared experience.

If every piece of media is a mirror, when do we ever look out the same window?

Where there’s shared context, there’s shared community.

But where shared context is intentionally built, community forms. Think of the dense, shorthand language of a private group chat. Sending memes back and forth is a high-frequency way of building a shared library of jokes, references, and reactions. This is the cozyweb. It’s a deliberate cultivation of context. By sharing these small, repeated inkblots, these groups create their own intimate, high-context worlds. They build a bubble not of one, but of a chosen few. A tribe.

So what?

As builders or users of technological mediums, we should invest in sharing context and investing in reinforced shared context. Otherwise we won’t be able to coordinate as a society because we won’t have any shared context to coordinate in. This should be a very obvious need, since we’re currently suffering from an awful lot of different contexts: We all see the same statement from politicians and hear wildly different things. And so we fight about it.

PS For the AI Builders Out There

We are all building a lot of AI tools that have personal context. We should consider the implications if we don’t invest in shared, collaborative contexts: How can I share my chats and interactions with you? How can I fork it and share it back? How can we be in a group chat with these AIs so we all see the same thing?

We’re going to set the Marshall-Mcluhan medium direction for a while, and we need to get this right.