Social media content lacks the spatial and temporal context real understanding requires.

Evidence

IT’S PRETTY INTUITIVE that truly understanding something requires attention to its context. What I want to emphasize here is that the way this process happened for me with birds was spatial and temporal; the relationships and processes I observed were things adjacent in space and time. For me, a sensing being, things like habitat and season helped me make sense of the species I saw, why I was seeing them, what they were doing and why. Surprisingly, it was this experience, and not a study on how Facebook makes us depressed, that helped me put my finger on what bothers me so much about my experience of social media. The information I encounter there lacks context, both spatially and temporally. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 527

Categorization

• QUESTION: The birding-to-social-media bridge is the core analytic move — worth checking whether Odell’s analogy holds or smuggles in a romantic view of slow attention.
• XREF: connects to: Spatial practices cannot be read apart from social context — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1402; Social-media big data can expose dynamics that cross-sectional studies miss. — Nurit Shnabel and Johannes Ullrich, Identity Needs in Intergroup Relations:…, 149