WhatIsContext

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Context is external to content (see WhatIsContent), but provides information that illuminates or otherwise alters the meaning of the content. The "thing" that we call content may not even be content without some external context to place it in. For instance, without any sentient life in the universe to understand books, all the libraries in the world would seem content-free. But then again, the concept of content wouldn't exist either.

All content exists in context (for example, sentient life). Some content shapes itself by the context which it perceives itself in. Taking extremely, we end up with PostModernism? whose focus is context.

And without CommonContext, we could not communicate with each other.

Originally written on Wiki:SequentialLanguage

Writing sequentially is unnecessary (and boring!). Often in good literature, many statements are left ambiguous until context is filled in later. SciFi is really good at this. Often, the context foreign to our own and has to be built over time. But until that happens, "Trim looked out over his slave farm," can't be unambiguously understood, nor can "The repitilian bus slithered across the pavement." In the previous case, is the farm a slave, or is a farm of slaves? In the latter, is the bus really reptilian, or is it merely a metaphor?

The experienced SciFi reader will suspend these questions until later when she learns that, indeed, on this planet organic life forms are used as machinery and that, in order to manufacture, or farm, these "machines," "slave" farms grow components for their "master" farms that assemble the final "machine." Thus, the additional context has clarified previous statements.

WhatIsContext

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