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"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. |
>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.