Context Blindness

Eva Berger is Professor of Media Studies at COMAS in Israel and also serves as Secretary of the Institute of General Semantics. She is co-author of The Communication Panacea: Pediatrics and General Semantics. She holds a Ph.D. in media ecology from New York University.

Preface – Acknowledgments – Introduction – That Was Then; This Is Now: Media and Decontextualized Information – New Paradigms as Premature Symptoms: Emotional Intelligence and Soft Skills – The Power of Context and The Importance of Situations – No Sense of Place: From Television to Social Media – No Sense of Context: Mobile, Data, Sensors, and Location –Delusions: Flat Earthers, Anti- vaxxers, and Global Warming Deniers High Conflict Personality (HCP): Tribalism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture – Fragility and Hypersensitivity: Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces, Trauma and Anxiety – Therapy for Context- Blind Individuals: CBT, ACT, and Social Stories – Therapy for a Context- Blind Humanity: Media Ecology as Context Analysis – Index.

“In this provocative and highly accessible book, Eva Berger identifies caetexia as a major malady of today’s times, one that bears a wide array of personal, social and political symptoms. Her abundant examples and theoretical connections allow readers to see key patterns across many different changes occurring throughout the contemporary world. In identifying context blindness as an unanticipated evolutionary consequence of digital media, Berger makes our fragmented, disconnected, and perplexing world more intelligible and more understandable. Tom Wolfe famously asked of Marshall McLuhan’s work, ‘What if he is right?’ I could not help but think along the same lines regarding Berger’s bold and sobering work here: ‘What if she is right?’”
—Corey Anton, Vice-President of the Institute of General Semantics, Professor of Communication Studies, Grand Valley State University