Context makes everything more compelling. It widens the viewpoint from which you interact with a topic. Context is that which is scarce.
I’m making a lot of connections, and I’m drawing little conclusions, and I guess I am trying to build some kind of meaning out of meeting him and getting to know him and that experience—but really, that’s just the story of what happened. And aside from that, just another job.
Learning
New learning -> more context, through understanding -> easier to gain new learning
If I just re-read it twice in a row, the things I didn’t understand I still wouldn’t understand. But I’m going to invest in more context. And then, many more pieces are going to fall into place… I view my skill as investing in context and having invested a lot of context already.
The more plants you can recognize, the more every hill, valley, and forest seems full of familiar little friends.
The hard part about teaching isn’t marshaling the facts and getting students to nod along as you’re writing on the board, it’s making the facts stick. One popular metaphor is that your mind is like velcro: the more hooks you have, the easier it is for things to adhere. Or, as Daniel Willingham writes, “The more you know, the easier it will be for you to learn new things.” The problem is, the converse of this is also true. The less you know the harder it is to learn new things. I prefer a spatial metaphor: if I hand you a new object, you need somewhere to put it where you know you can find it again, or else it will get lost. If your brain is full of coat hooks, you’ll have a place to put new coats.
Reading
The context in which you read somethings affects how you respond to it. Often we don’t read things at the right time for them to have the most impact. It’s important to re-read, provide new interactions between the content and your current context. Context makes everything more compelling.
Re-reading books extends the repetition. It also exposes the ideas in the book (i.e. the main idea expressed different ways) to new insights / experiences / emotions you have since the last read.
Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before.
Too Much Context
Too much context can be detrimental, both for the witness and the work being witnessed. For example:
- Sports
Injecting a higher level of fame and attention affects the structure of the work. Season 2 of Cheer is partly about the impact of allowing a much bigger audience to engage with the sport, and the effects of fame on the students.
Sports betting adds more context than just which team or player wins or loses—individual stats become important regardless of the overall outcome. Rooting against your team winning, or against a player on your team getting on the rebound, or whatever anti-competitive feeling you might get from having an active wager. Though you could argue that it heightens the tension, makes the game more compelling, etc., especially if you’re betting in the same direction as your team. Or if you don’t support a team, any bet adds stakes…
- Fictional Universes
Fiction is often more interesting when questions are left unanswered. The current culture of extracting as much value from IP as possible means that entire shows can be created out of creating answers to these questions, often to the shows’ and IP’s detriment.