First Principles

There is an old adage that whatever wasn’t invented by the time you were born is technology. I feel it’s generally true, though it’s probably more by the time you were 7 years old or so. CDs were never technology, the internet certainly was.

I think the point is more so “what are the things that are native to your toolset, to your way of looking at the world?” vs. “what are the ways you’ve learned to see the world?”

I was talking to a friend about this recently, and about using Snapchat. Like many people over 30, he has just avoided it. I said that I didn’t pretend to understand it fully, and still feel completely awkward with video. But I thought using it, learning by doing, was important. The thing is I didn’t grow up with video readily available to me — even the still image was only available for 24 shots before someone had to develop the photographs.

Instagram’s dominance is also only possible because scarcity when it came to still images was no longer a thing. Likewise, Snapchat is made possible because of the ubiquity of the means of creation. Video is default and part of a natural tool set for teenagers today in a way that it has never been for any other generation in our history. We are kidding ourselves if we don’t think that will fundamentally change how they use it and what stories they tell in ways that are currently completely unfamiliar.

Their level of visual literacy is literally unprecedented. We will all still learn to see the world in new ways, but video is native to their toolsets, and that is fascinating.

Or put another way, and possibly my favorite Shirky-ism:

Tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.

#nowplaying Spoon — Inside Out (Tycho remix)