Under the Influences: Context as Strategy

©2015 Keith Anderson / mkanderson.com / @suredoc 1
Under the Influences:
Context as Strategy
Keith Anderson
@suredoc
mkanderson.com

The Under the Influences: Context as Strategy
#stc15
@suredoc
@fpcontent
keith@mkanderson.com
futureproofingcontent.com

©2015 Keith Anderson / mkanderson.com / @suredoc 3©2015 Keith Anderson / mkanderson.com / @suredoc 3
Under the Influences: Context as Strategy
About This Presentation
The following presentation takes excerpts from
my forthcoming book, Future-Proofing
Content: How Context Can Prevent a Complex
Digital Dark Age.
As it is a work in progress, some information
may change.
If you want to cite this presentation or the
book itself, please contact me before doing so
as I might have more updated information.
Artwork by Cecily Anderson

OUT OF CONTEXT

Content Untethered
Content without context is just data.
Much of today’s personal and organizational
content is roaming around free, disconnected
from its creators, easily misunderstood and
increasingly irrelevant.

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe
1979
Printing gave birth to organizational,
scientific, and technical documentation,
and catalyzed a change in culture so
great, it could be considered humanity’s
first singularity.
My quick summary regarding the
introduction of the printing press:
Elizabeth Eisenstein

How We Untethered Our Content
Disruptive technologies: typewriters, hypermedia, social media
The databasing of everything
Social exclusion and the digital divide
IT’s ownership of organizational knowledge
Business’ bottom-line culture
Legal as the filter for everything
Hyper-consumerism
Devaluation of content in general

It’s Sort of Our Fault
Early single-sourcing practitioners
created the concept of portable
content, but forgot to hand-over
the knowledge of context.
We removed more than just
formatting.

The words, images, and other associated media
we create on behalf of our organizations.
Organizational Content
Our mission as professional communicators is to
effectively communicate with our audiences, which
is in the best interest of our organizations.

Organizations are the articulation of human
collaboration.
We’re Better Together
Our companies, governments, religious
institutions, non-profits, and formal affiliations
exist to do things individuals cannot.

If we are to truly support our organizations, content strategy must
include all organizational content, support the long-term welfare of
the organization, avoid shareholder worship, identify customers as
people, and communicate effectively with our audiences.
The New Content Strategy

Organizational content isn’t limited to technical, marketing,
training, internal, or business documentation anymore. Yet you
must remain focused on your purpose as a communicator.
A jack-of-all-trades and a master of communication.
The New Content Strategist

CONTENT AS A JOURNEY

Collaboration is Our Destiny
Language evolved
from humans
interacting in
collaboration.

Language is Interactive
Context transforms the static into
recognizable patterns, transcending
barriers like time, culture, translation,
distance, and emotion, to name a few.

The Well of Lost Plots
A Thursday Next Novel
2003
“Books may look like nothing more than
words on a page but they are actually an
infinitely complex Imagino-Transference
technology that translates odd inky
squiggles into pictures inside your head.”
Jasper Fforde

Transforming Data
Data requires awareness and cognition to
become information.

Transforming Information
Information must be processed to
be understood.

Understanding Understanding
Understanding is the point where
communication happens. Once individuals
understand information, they can use it.

Transforming Information
Information requires socialization to become
knowledge.

Transforming Knowledge
Knowledge requires
mental and social
maintenance, as well
as continuous
tailoring.

The Path to Wisdom
Context is the fuel powering content from data to wisdom.
Wisdom comes from true intimacy with knowledge.

WHAT IS CONTEXT?

We know context it when we identify it.
It’s nearly impossible to provide a precise, technical
definition for context because we understand it through its
use rather than by identification.
Context Defined

Most Context Research
Philosophy
Mobile computing
(advertising)

The collection of Influences affecting the
creation and cognitive processing of content.
Context Defined for Content Strategy
Interactive
Granular
Sticky
Relational
Fickle
Context Is

Context is a Tool
Context is a means to
Be understood
Build trust
Provide clarity
Prolong relevance
Support assertions
Context ensures the message of our content is received,
understood, and invokes its purpose.

ENCAPSULATED CONTEXT

The most effective forms are based on
conventions and standards shared among large
groups of people over long time periods.
A delivery system of content with the intent of providing as
many frames of reference as possible to accommodate
barriers to understanding.
Encapsulated Context

Since the 1450s, we have been significantly
improving content distribution.
The Book
Tables of content
Margins
Headers and footers
Indexes
Appendixes
Bibliographies
Footnotes
Endnotes
Contextual enhancements

The Form of the Book
The Importance of Tradition in Typography
1966
“The form of our letters, the older
handwriting, and inscriptions, as much as
the cuttings in use today, reflects a
convention that has slowly solidified, an
agreement hardened in many battles.”
Jan Tschichold

Other Forms of Encapsulated Context
Books
Record albums
Films
Television programming
Museum exhibits
Games

CONTEXT AS STRATEGY

Regardless of the type of content we produce, words are used in
content creation. This includes everything from our own inner dialog,
collaborations with others, description of the content on whatever
media it’s presented, and its associated metadata when stored and
saved for later.
Writing Matters

Deliberate use of all information available about yourself,
your organization, and audience to fulfill the purpose of
your organization’s content.
Context Strategy
Profit
Entertainment
Education
Connections
Compliance
Matters of Record
Disclosure
Purpose-driven content

Personalized Context
Projected Context
Future Context
The Big Three Contexts
Applied Context Strategy

Organization (Environment)
Our Own Attention
Lexicon
Existing Trust
Technology
Process
Ability
Areas of influence on the creative
side of content production
Personalized Context

Persuasion
Common Ground
Construction
Gestalt
Framing
The influence we deliberately use
to affect our audience
Projected Context

Encapsulation
Time
Relevancy
Culture
Strategy
Technology
Inevitable outside Influences
Future Context

Cultural
Emotional
Legal
Geographical
Environmental
Physical
Technical
Temporal
Intentional
Educational
Like design constraints, contextual constraints give us
limits to our creations. Constraints apply to both you and
your audience.
Contextual Constraints

YOUR TAKEAWAYS

Why Are You Creating Content?
Profit
Entertainment
Education
Connections
Compliance
History
Take Content Seriously
Why Do You Have an Audience?
Product Support
Information Seeking
They Want Connections
Discourse Communities
You Are Unique
Fact Checking
Write and Design with Purpose.

Consider the context of everything applicable to
your environment, yourself, and your audience.
Take Context Seriously

People are not gadgets. Stop treating them as
empty vessels with bank accounts. Communicate
with them.
Take Your Audience Seriously

Employ your knowledge of a
long and amazing history of
human communication. Build
on that proud tradition. The
more seriously you take
content, the more seriously
your readers will take you and
your message.
Take Writing Seriously

Take the time to conduct
reader research. Build
profiles, conduct surveys, and
make sure you understand
what they expect from you.
Take the Work Seriously

QUESTIONS?
keith@mkanderson.com
@suredoc
mkanderson.com

References
All images are public domain with the exception of the book cover . Please do not cite without permission as this is a work in progress.
• Albers, Michael J., and Beth Mazur, eds. 2003. Content & Complexity: Information Design in Technical Communication. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Angwin, Julia. 2015. Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance.
• Ben-Shahar, Omri. 2007. Boilerplate the Foundation of Market Contracts. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Cialdini, Robert B. 2009. Influence: Science and Practice. Pymble, NSW; New York, NY: HarperCollins ebooks.
• Colbourn, Andrea Maria. 1988. The Typewriter as an Agent of Change, 1867 to 1954: A Drucker/Ellulian Analysis. New York University.
• Duranti, Alessandro., and Charles Goodwin. 1992. Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. 2009. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe ; Volumes I and II. 14th printing. Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press.
• Fforde, Jasper. 2003. The Well of Lost Plots. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
• Grice, H. P. 1972. Intention and Uncertainty. London: Oxford University Press.
• Hagar, Hubert A., Lillian Grissom Wilson, Elsie Lillian Hutchinson, and Clyde Insley Blanchard. 1935. The English of Business. New York: The Gregg Pub. Co.
• Henle, Mary, and Rudolf Arnheim. 1976. Vision and Artifact. New York: Springer Pub. Co.
• Huey, Edmund Burke. 1908. The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading. The Macmillan company.
• Jackson, Maggie. 2008. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Prometheus Books.
• Jan Tschichold. 1991. The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design. Hartley & Marks Publishers.
• Kanizsa, Gaetano. 1979. Organization in Vision: Essays on Gestalt Perception. New York: Praeger.
• Langer, Arthur M., and Arthur M. Langer. 2011. Information Technology and Organizational Learning: Managing Behavioral Change Through Technology and Education. 2nd ed. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
• McCloskey, Deirdre N. 1998. The Rhetoric of Economics. 2nd ed. Rhetoric of the Human Sciences. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press.
• Morozov, Evgeny. 2014. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. New York: PublicAffairs.
• Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Radin, Margaret Jane. 2012. Boilerplate: The Fine Print, Vanishing Rights, and the Rule of Law. Princeton University Press.
• Ransone, R. K. 1981. Technical Snobbery Versus Clear Communicating.
• Ruen, Chris. 2012. Freeloading. OR Books.
• Steinberg, Sigfrid. 1961. Five Hundred Years of Printing. 2nd ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
• Stein, Howard F. 1998. Euphemism, Spin, and the Crisis in Organizational Life. Westport, Conn: Quorum Books.
• Stein, Howard F. 2001. Nothing Personal, Just Business a Guided Journey into Organizational Darkness. Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books.
• Tomasello, Michael. 2008. Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press..
• Warschauer, Mark. 2003. Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

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