The announcement that the Islamic development department (Jakim) and central committee for applications for filming and performances by foreign artistes (Puspal) are investigating alleged elements of ritualistic worship at The Weeknd’s recent concerts at the Bukit Jalil national stadium highlights a recurring cultural tension in Malaysia.

As a critical media scholar, I view this controversy not merely as a clash over entertainment guidelines, but as a textbook case of “context collapse”.

Coined by media researcher Danah Boyd and further theorised with Alice Marwick in their seminal 2011 study in New Media & Society (“I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience”), context collapse occurs when digital platforms flatten multiple, distinct audiences into a single space.