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 almost tautological, 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” keeps pulling my attention. In fact, I think it matters to read context in everything. Our daily lives are always a giant, chaotic mass, and life never comes with a neat three-line summary. Important insights do not come from isolated scenes but from the context that stretches across the larger picture. Whether it’s reading context in relationships, at work, or even in my own life, which by now feels like a thirty-year epic, none of the contexts I encounter feels unimportant.