I came across the article Potato Chips and Internet Memes in the newspaper and found it thought-provoking, so here’s an excerpt.
… The Internet, at least up to this point, favors fast and short information. The devices, the platforms, the mediums, the users. The phrase “fast and short” is a bit of a homophone, because in the internet world, information needs to be short to travel quickly.
However, knowledge is usually not short. Knowledge is a structure of information connected in a logical way. The deeper the knowledge, the larger and more complex the structure, the more important context is. If you take a book, break it down into sentence-by-sentence chunks, and read it out of order, you’ll understand very little of it, even if you see every word of it. That’s the internet and social media.
The word “context” is unusually catchy. In fact, I think it’s important to read context in everything. Our daily lives are always a giant chaotic mass, and there’s no such thing as a friendly three-line summary. Important insights come not from scenes, but from the context that spans the big picture. Whether it’s reading context in my relationships, reading context in my work, or even reading context in my life, which is a 30-year epic, none of the contexts I encounter are unimportant.