The power of EMOTION.

Yesterday while I was scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed I came across the story that Snapchat had done a Snapchat Story on Laylatul Qadr, in the sacred Muslim city of Mecca and at the Grand Mosque, it was widely appreciated and as I have read on multiple websites it was the first time in modern history that Muslims had allowed the world to come into their sacred city and view their faith at its utter purity in its absolute transparency.

What was followed by the story was quite amazing and beautiful, the hashtag #Mecca_Live started trending on twitter and soon a simple story portrayed by pictures went on to change the point of views of many people and leave a positive impression on many people of a religion that in recent times has been portrayed my the Media and Politicians as rather extreme and violent.

So how exactly did a few hundred pictures create such a big impact on so many people and compelled some of them to life changing decisions?

It`s simple, it is lying there bare and naked in all it glory, it is the one thing that can travel through innumerable dimensions and that knows no bounds when it comes to human interaction and social communication, it is EMOTION.

In less than 300 hundred seconds Snapchat changed the way people think about something, it was able to change people fundamental understanding of something, it gave them in one respect a complete overhaul and in others a modified engine with a better paint job. All what Snapchat was able to do was because of Snapchat`s fundamental ability to communicate emotion in the best way possible through Pictures. Pictures when compared with text have the ability to actually deliver emotions to the person seeing them and are more trust-worthy as compared to something that is said through text. Pictures have they ability to paint a picture in a persons mind almost instantly, they have the ability to make people believe as it is commonly said :

I`ll believe it when I see it.

One of the biggest factors behind the success of Snapchat is that it delivers emotion, it puts the emotion in conversations and in events, it communicates the feel and allows the people viewing the pictures, a feel of the emotions experienced by the sender.

You look into your common day conversations and social gatherings and all sorts of human interaction and you will observe that at its core the one thing driving everything is emotions and feelings, when we talk to other emotions and communicated by not only the tone we speak in but a large quantity of them are transmitted by our body language, how we stand, how we deliver those words, movement of our eyes, our elbow position, and the lot. Emotions are experienced at their most epic of levels when we can see them, the voice of a child crying may not influence a person to help the child but the sight of it would certainly make many do so, we may not be frightened by the sound and feel of the air blowing on a mountains edge but standing on that edge and seeing where you stand will certainly inflict utter fear in anyone. So you see emotions are vastly felt through the eyes and ears and nose only compliment them, put a blind man on a cliffs edge he might not be afraid but you put a deaf man in his place and he will definitely hear the fear in his ears.

Thus it can be concluded that at the core of any Snapchat story or conversation is raw emotion. This ability to transfer emotion has been the ultimate hack that Snapchat has been able to do, it has propelled it to success and has equally propelled human emotional transfer over the internet to new heights.

The reason behind the success of a text story is its ability to produce emotion in the readers mind and consequently in the readers body. You equip that with the ability to see that emotion and produce the ultimate online human interaction platform.

If something similar to the Mecca Live story had been done via simple text or tweets or even by posts by Facebook it would have failed to produce the impact that it has, because not only did Snapchat provide raw emotion to be felt it was doing it at a staggering pace too, thousands of images at a staggering pace produce a gigantic amount of emotion.