No Context / Out of Context Accounts

Submission 24,845

Part of a series on Gimmick Accounts. [View Related Entries]

About

No Context / Out of Context Accounts refer to single topic social media pages, blogs, and accounts devoted to posting quotes and screenshots from pieces of popular media without the necessary clips to help the quote make sense, resulting in a phrase or moment the reader can interpret in ways not intended by the media.

Origin

The earliest known "No Context" blog is the Tumblr ^[5] "Out of Context Science," which regularly posted humorous, out-of-context quotes from science articles. On December 21st, 2010, the blog's first post read:

"Regular stick-carrying has no discernible function," wrote Wrangham and Kahlenberg, "yet it accounted for more than one-third of all stick use."

Spread

One of the earliest accounts devoted to posting quotes without context is @NYTMinusContext, a Twitter account devoted to taking clips of sentences written in the New York Times and posting them without the surrounding words. The account's first tweet was made on November 12th, 2013.^[1]

In 2016, accounts devoted to out-of-context posts began incorporating screenshots. Writing in Vulture,^[2] Kathryn VanArendonk pointed to two accounts created in 2016 devoted to out-of-context examples of Louis Theroux's work and The Great British Bakeoff, respectively, helped popularize the type of account (examples shown below).

More accounts appeared in 2017, working with shows such as The Good Place and Nathan For You (examples shown below).

Outside of Twitter, one of the most popular kinds of Out of Context accounts are centered on comic books. For example, on Tumblr, popular accounts include outofcontextcomicpanels^[3] and outofcontext-comics.^[4]