Snapchat as a definition of life
On empathy and unfiltered experiences.
The quest for authenticity and identity on the social web is a double-edged sword.
On one end, you find yourself with more tools than ever to show so many aspects of your life you otherwise couldn’t before. On the other, you can also edit more and more of those aspects, in more and more ways, which creates an artificial sense of lifecasting — the life you broadcast is not necessarily the life you live (or just a very selective part of it).
That’s why I found this by Matthew Panzarino so fascinating:
One of the concepts (…) I’ve been thinking about for a bit: The idea of services like Snapchat, Meerkat (and Twitter’s recent acquisition Periscope), and even Vine as ‘empathy machines’.
(…)
The raw, immediate and intimate nature of un-filtered access does more than just lend a feeling of ‘veracity’ to these services.
That ‘truth’ or ‘realness’ factor is often cited as a prime driver of Snapchat’s success. I’ve heard a hundred variants of ’millennials don’t like it when video is produced or manufactured feel, that’s why they like Snapchat’. I don’t think so. I know plenty of people in that category (and younger) that watch a bunch of trashy TV that is plenty produced. It’s not the fact that it looks kind of crappy that keeps them coming back to Snapchat and that (I think) will fascinate them about Periscope and Meerkat.
Instead, it’s the empathic transaction that occurs when you’re given an intimate look into someone’s life, sans-filter. By simply eliminating the tools or time needed to stage your life, these products cut through those tendencies we have to be the thing that people think we are.
One of the aspects I like (and sometimes hate) about Snapchat is that you can’t upload pictures to your Story from your photo gallery. That makes sense: it’s a smart and very subtle way to avoid artificial recordings of life. Want to tell your story? Tell it in the moment. No room for edits beforehand; you either shoot it then and there, or you’ve missed it.
As an ephemeral service, Snapchat is a pure reflection of one of the most potent and daunting definitions of life: everything is fleeting. Austin Kleon said it better than I could:
This, too, shall pass. On Snapchat and in life.
The fleeting nature of life makes all things seem more authentic if they are unfiltered, imperfect. Curiously enough that’s also where most empathy comes from: not from a perfect picture in a postcard, but from an awkward moment where you’re trying to say “I love you” and lose your voice or something (by the way, that’s why romantic comedies, as a genre, work).
Regardless of Meerkat’s future (or Snapchat’s for that matter), I like this idea of empathy machines. When I started working with social media, the thing that got me excited about it was the authenticity of the things we could do. Just because platforms got more mature, doesn’t mean we should let go of the child-like mindset that often leads to the most interesting things you could do there.
Life through the lens of social media will never be purely authentic — we often do (and should) have a say in what goes out there. But that doesn’t mean everything needs to be based on a purely artificial recording of existence. Just because you can edit something, doesn’t mean you always should. Apps like Snapchat get that.
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