Physical social boundaries gave utterances meaning that collapse destroys

Evidence

The surprise homecoming party is an example of the useful architectural metaphor that Meyrowitz employs in No Sense of Place: it’s as if all of the walls around different social environments have come down. Unfortunately, those rooms and walls were precisely what provided the spatial context for what was said in them, since they summoned a distinct audience out of the anonymous masses by only letting some people in. In turn, that audience was able to make sense of each utterance by encountering it in the space where the sentiment grew, continuous with or adjacent to other related utterances. If we imagine a collection of these “rooms” as an ecology of contexts, it’s hard not to see social media as a contextual monoculture. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 548

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘contextual monoculture’ framing foreshadows Odell’s garden/ecological metaphors used throughout.
• SEED: The ‘rooms as ecology vs. monoculture’ image could seed an essay on how place-based meaning requires porous-but-real boundaries.