| >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. |
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.