[calinet6]

As a user of snapchat, I've found unexpected value in the type of interaction it offers. My entire family is on it: we communicate visually daily where we never communicated before. We don't have to worry about making the communication high quality or meaningful because it's ephemeral; the fact that the communication is happening at all is high quality and meaningful.

If it's replaced, whatever comes next will probably be informed by the human way in which snapchat communicates, and hopefully will build on the idea.

Just think of it as a mobile translation of a core communication concept: simply looking at someone and talking to them, which is by nature visual and ephemeral. Snapchat captures some of the core emotions and psychology there that nothing else before it had.

Just saying—the instinct is to see Snapchat as useless and valueless and an enigma of popularity and hive mentality. I don't think it is.

[unclebucknasty]

>We don't have to worry about making the communication high quality or meaningful because it's ephemeral; the fact that the communication is happening at all is high quality and meaningful.

Wow. There is value in a service because it enables meaningless communication. Is this what it's come to?

Perhaps it's a problem that your family didn't communicate before Snapchat. Perhaps it would be better to address that, rather than substitute meaningless communication, then call it good. Perhaps Snapchat is making you feel better now, but leaving you worse off in the long run--kind of like heroin. The more you use it, the emptier you feel.

>Snapchat captures some of the core emotions and psychology there that nothing else before it had.

How about actually taking time to visit with people and talk to them? How about having actual experiences with them? Do these capture core emotions? What is this idea that every human or social function has to have an app or be captured in a product (and monetized)? Why does the act of filling our human needs require interception and redirection for the sake of profit?

Snapchat is just one in a sea of products (including media, celebrity worship, reality shows, etc.) aimed at making life a series of distractions from the emptiness and meaninglessness that haunt us. Of course, these very distractions in lieu of pursuing thoughtful, meaningful lives and quality relationships leave us feeling even emptier; thus ever hungrier for the next distraction. A vicious cycle if ever there was one.

Snapchat is an empty tool of distraction, that happens to fit a culture which is pushing itself to crave ever more of the same. Period. Trying to credit it for filling some deep emotional need is like crediting the iceberg's mass for later slowing the Titanic's sinking. Snapchat isn't the solution for what ails us. It's the cause of it.

[nl]

Wow. There is value in a service because it enables meaningless communication. Is this what it's come to?

Err, it has always been thus. Even non-human social animals like chimpanzees use "meaningless communication" to reinforce social bonds.

How about actually taking time to visit with people and talk to them? How about having actual experiences with them? Do these capture core emotions? What is this idea that every human or social function has to have an app or be captured in a product (and monetized)? Why does the act of filling our human needs require interception and redirection for the sake of profit?

What gives you the right to be so judgemental? In the 19th century people thought civilisation was built letter writing, and latter the telephone call.

Communication is the essence of society, and that communication can take many forms. Daring to impose your own views of how communication should be done is to attempt to impose your own view of society on others.

Also: HN. Internet Forum. Why exactly aren't we taking time to visit with people and talk[ing]?

[unclebucknasty]

>Even non-human social animals like chimpanzees use "meaningless communication" to reinforce social bonds.

Reinforce, not supplant. Note that the grandparent mentioned that his family never communicated. Now they are happy with their "improved" meaningless communication.

Generally speaking, what are we giving up and what are we gaining by redirecting more and more of our interactions and relationships through these new channels? Are we really supplementing meaningful interaction, or are we replacing it?

>What gives you the right to be so judgemental?

What gives me the right to an opinion? I suppose the same thing that gives you the right to a counter-opinion.

>Daring to impose your own views of how communication should be done is to attempt to impose your own view of society on others

Ditto. You think we're moving in the right direction. I do not. Why am I the one who is imposing views? Why isn't it you? Why isn't it the companies who seek to change the way we communicate for their own profit? In fact, you are the ones who are arguing for change. If anything, I am questioning the change that you are "imposing" on me. I would encourage you to be a little more thougthtful about your position.

And, surely, you can think of moments in history when whole societies were moving in the wrong direction until a few "judgemental" people recognized it and "imposed their views" for the ultimate betterment of society as a whole? Do you really want to argue that we should all just go along like unthinking lemmings without questioning our direction?

>HN. Internet Forum. Why exactly aren't we taking time to visit with people and talk[ing]?

That's pedantic and trite. Surely you don't really believe that I am arguing that we should all unplug our telephones and abolish the Internet. Surely you don't believe that is the only remedy to the problem I presented.

[calinet6]

"his family never communicated"

This is ridiculous. You're making baseless assumptions.

What I said was that we communicate visually where we never communicated before: we didn't communicate visually on a daily basis because we live on opposite coasts. We communicate in a lot of other ways, but we hadn't communicated in this specific visual way in a long time, because we simply don't get the chance to fly out and see each other face to face that often.

We get a stream of our daily lives, fleeting moments of emotion and faces and events, truly deep levels of communication, that we did not have before. Snapchat added that. We're in fact happy with our improved meaningful communication.

Phone conversations are great and we do that too, but they're planned and orchestrated in a way Snapchat isn't. Facebook covers another angle, but it's public and permanent. In the sense of pure functionality, Snapchat introduced something actually new, and it's valuable, and it's meaningful. That's my and my parents' experience. To quote my father verbatim: "We're getting to see a side of you and your life we haven't seen in ten years."

You do, in fact, have a judgmental bent, and worse: you don't know what the hell you're talking about. I'm trying to elucidate a value that you're blind to due to your bias for the negative social effects, and instead of trying to understand it, you're trying to tell me that I'm wrong and making assumptions to prove your point. You could have asked questions, probed me about my family relationships and this new interesting method of communication, started a discussion, and been productive; instead you fought for your opinion in a vacuum. Talk about pedantic and trite.

Believe me, I'm the first to be wary of new technology and the multitude of complex side-effects that it brings to society, and I recognize that a change in the modality of our conversation has many of those problems. But you have to see the truth of the whole thing: look for the positive effects as well as the negative, and surely if society values something you should look at why, and how, and which strings of the human mind it plucks. You gotta look harder at this one.

[unclebucknasty]

>You're making baseless assumptions.

>You do, in fact, have a judgmental bent, and worse: you don't know what the hell you're talking about.

Spare me the drama. Look, words matter my friend. Your post was written in such a way that 98.9473% of English-speaking readers would understand it to mean that you did not previously communicate with your family. Perhaps the phrase "we never communicated before" was a poor choice on your part. And, no, pre-pending the "where" does not clarify. Before you bash people over the head for their responses to you, perhaps you should consider writing more clearly.

You might say that I read it that way because I have a "bias", but we'll have to agree to disagree. One thing on which we can agree is that I do clearly have a particular opinion on the matter. So, as written previously, your post simply provided a good illustration and thus elicited my comment.

It's great that you are finding value in Snapchat. I would say that you are in the minority (in terms of how it is impacting meaningful interaction). That is, many of our most popular new modalities are not supplementing our quality interactions, but replacing them with interaction of "lower" quality. I'm not just picking on Snapchat here, although I think it almost perfectly epitomizes the problem (for instance, with many of these technologies, there is also a decidedly narcissistic bent). But, even SMS to some extent costs us more meaningful interaction.

In any event, I never claimed that any of these technologies were universally evil or 100% bad. My point is that there's a solid trend toward replacing vs. enhancing quality interaction. Across the board, society is changing the way it communicates and generally I don't believe it's good.