Word.ws English Dictionary

context collapse

context collapse noun: the flattening of multiple audiences into a single context, so that information intended for one audience finds its way to another, as with television and the Internet.

Noun

context collapse (uncountable)

  1. The flattening of multiple audiences into a single context, so that information intended for one audience finds its way to another, as with television and the Internet.
    • Although context collapse can happen in offline settings, such as a wedding, online spaces that enable communication among groups traditionally associated with different facets of one's identity are often sites of context collapse.2015, S. Shyam Sundar, editor, The Handbook of the Psychology of Communication Technology, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 218
    • Within different communities, groups, or dyads, the same memetic media could be deployed as a long-standing community in-joke, dadaist absurdity, or even as fighting words (or images, as the case may be). […] These texts might still be constitutive, but as a result of rampant context collapse, it's...2018, Whitney Phillips, Ryan M. Milner, The Ambivalent Internet […] , John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 122

Origin of context collapse

Coined by social media scholar and youth researcher danah boyd.

Questions about context collapse

What does context collapse mean?
Context collapse means the flattening of multiple audiences into a single context, so that information intended for one audience finds its way to another, as with television and the Internet.
What part of speech is context collapse?
Context collapse is a noun.

Words near context collapse in the dictionary

  1. contexed
  2. contexing
  3. context
  4. context clue
  5. context clues
  6. context collapse
  7. context compaction
  8. context menu
  9. context menus
  10. context principle
  11. context-based learning

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: context collapse (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “context collapse.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/context_collapse. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.