YouthNet blog

Saturday Oct 17, 2009

Providing support out of context

Over the years there's been a progressive trend towards valuing content over context in how we communicate as a society.

Ever since writing took over from our rich oral tradition, contextualised communication has been increasingly sidelined by the content of what we communicate.

The history of Christianity in Western society is a case in point where historically after the Reformation, debate turned on whether the content or the context of scripture was the right path to spiritual understanding.

Today, the focus on content is really a battle over how we communicate as a society. Is it better to keep our communication clear and singular in meaning? Or is it more accurate to accept that what we communicate is always multi-layered, nuanced and requires reading between the lines?

One way to understand the Enlightenment is as a movement that argued passionately for the former, while the fightback with the Romantics a century or so later, was a passionate defence of the latter.

Social web: where content is king

Many have remarked that the social web is simply a step on from broadcast or mass media, which was in turn a step on from the printing press. Each technological advance has added weight to the 'content camp', and detracted from the 'context camp' approach to understanding and successfully communicating together as a society.

With the dominance of content, the lack of context in communication is problematic to say the least. Again, a popular observation about the social web is that a key characteristic is the cross-cutting context in which much of the communication on it takes place. For example, a blog post can be written in a particular time, reacting to a particular stimulus and shaped by the author's particular mood of the moment. However, that blog post can be found by readers later on in very different times, places (thanks to searchability and durability of the web) and replicated within very different contexts. Web content loses it's context even quicker than other forms of modern communication.

Online support and advice where content is king, on the face of it, is even more problematic than just simply communicating a message.

Online support services: out of context

How do we understand content without the context of body language, vocal intonation, personal connection or understanding of the author's past history, personality and behaviour? Albert Mehrabian's much misunderstood observation on content and context is a great example. Mehrabian understood just how context (verbal and non-verbal cues) can be critical to understanding the content of our communication when we're expressing thoughts laden heavy with emotion and feeling. Surely this tendency of the social web to emphasise content over context, poses an enormous challenge to any online advice service seeking to support users emotional, as well as information needs.

For this reason online advice services must play to their strengths. Through our work on askTheSite on TheSite.org responding to questions posted by users in confidence online, it is clear that putting content before context can have its benefits.

Context can act as a barrier or cloud to understanding the content or heart of the matter. The style of delivery and the packaging of the message can distract, mislead or detract from an advisor's understanding of what the author of the content might intend to mean. Presented with just the content of the issues, with the context of the user's personal history, personality and rapport very definitely in the background, an advisor is in a better position to be able to respond to the user's issues and concerns at hand.

Secondly, enabling service users to concentrate on communicating content anonymously, can liberate them from the embarrassment and anxiety of the context they're in, that may have prevented them from talking in the round about the issues they face. Online support can offer the user the safety of anonymity and confidentiality that may help persuade users to speak up about issues affecting them that they may not have been able to share with anyone else. This makes online advice a vital plank in any strategy to improve the early intervention and support we can offer young people.

Interestingly, stripping out the context, removes most incentives for service users to 'test' the support service, posting joke, blank (silent) or hoax questions. The issue of test callers is a non-trivial matter for many telephone support services, where test callers can place a huge burden on scarce resource and capacity.

Contextual communication: making a comeback

Perhaps as the social web matures, so contextually-based communication is just starting to make a comeback. What to many is Twitter's banality, is misunderstood phatic communication putting the context before the content. Foursquare, on the other hand, is a reminder of the power of communication that comes with a built-in geolocational context.

For all these advances, it is worth noting how utterly dismal current software is at processing contextual information. Content is still king. You only have to look at how it's possible to build a multi-billion dollar business on keyword search of content to understand that. Given this current landscape, it's important that online advice and support services play to their strengths and understand their weaknesses in this content vs context battle going on around them.

Image courtesy of Weidmaier on Flickr