The word context has been zinging around for most of last year. We’ve been using it to talk about what our AIs know, or what our stack is, or why we react to the same stimulus differently. This post is not so much a coherent essay as a series of meditations.
Context in reading
One of the things I remember really clearly about learning to read is that after you sound a word out using phonics, you look at the words around it that you know, and see if you can figure out what the new word is. This is useful for words like read and read, which are different in spoken language, but look the same in text. It’s also useful if you’re trying to figure out words like heliotrope. By location next to “pajamas” and in comparison to “navy”, we know that it’s probably a color (except when it’s a flower).
This kind of context is very human, but it’s also similar to what we use to bound an AI’s range of enquiry and search.
Context in embodiment
This is about our physical bodies, and how people react to them. When I’m standing on a street corner and people drive by, they see what I’ve chosen to wear, my approximate age, my skin color, my posture. In person, my context is a middle-aged white woman. People treat me like that, and I expect to be treated like that. It’s lucky for me that my inner self is pretty congruent with my outer presentation. What the people who perceive me bring to my context is their own context, how they feel about white women, or middle-aged people, or people with bright hair.
Context in community
This is the context that I’m leaning into learning in the coming year. How do I belong to communities? How do I show up in them, and how do I make the communities I choose part of my reactions to the world? I’m working on learning my neighbor’s names, so they have names, and not just “that guy with the white truck”. I’m considering looking for a new church, but the community has to feel right to me. I’m part of the DevRel community, the DevOps community, the tech writing community. Like everyone, I’m embedded in all of these communities and contexts simultaneously.
This also includes the natural and built contexts around me. What spaces do I move through, and am I appreciating them, and how they work for or against me? I’m not a brain in a jar, and I live in this context, with freezing rain and air quality alerts and neighborhood cats and sidewalks and balmy nights and other humans.
Context in experience
In my post about being a “smokejumper“, I wrote that interviews with deep history are uncomfortable for me to do, because my history is broad, and extensive. I keep thinking about what that means for my understanding of my own career. In the context I have chosen, lots of short jobs are a good sign, because I am frequently hired to come in, do a specific thing, and then leave. If your context demands a year of onboarding before someone even becomes useful, then it’s a bad fit for me. It’s not a bad position, and I’m not a bad worker, it’s just a context mismatch.
My experience has given me this perspective, but it took a while to get to it, because my early context was much more about “permanent” (hah) jobs. Now when I start working with a team, I have this huge cloud of patterns that I can match to their problems, and ways their needs are the same or different than other places I’ve been.
Conclusion
I’m going to try to notice contexts I’m in this year, and what they mean, and whether I want to be in that context. It’s a good way to think about what I can and cannot change.
Post-conclusion
The “Star Word” I was assigned for this year at an Epiphany service is “devotion”. That one is going to take a lot more thinking and sitting with. (I don’t like it, ew)