ABSTRACT
The phrase "context collapse" stemmed from the realization that, while the Internet offered a potentially infinite audience for one's communications, it also, by this very fact, made it impossible to perform the rhetorical adjustments of language and gesture that one typically makes during a face-to-face interaction. The barrier between the earthly and heavenly realms remains permeable to insight and understanding, and the occasional collapse from one into the other is regarded as epiphanic rather than merely disorienting. As early modern scientific developments began transforming understanding of perception, it became harder to feel that the mind perceived objects directly and as they really were. This chapter explains about an architect who sprawled amid his books atop a giant column, surveying - or rather imagining - a landscape into which the architectures of disparate times and places have been compressed as easily as if they were on a piece of paper.
