Watch The Phone
Tech trends come to life in a field full of music fans.
Like everyone else in the tech industry, I skimmed Mary Meeker’s “Internet Trends” last month. I’d noted with interest that Snapchat is on its way to dominating mobile photo sharing, but that stat didn’t hit home until I got to see its key demographic in action.
I recently spent the weekend at the Govenors Ball music festival in NYC. After taking in sets from Pitchfork-approved acts like Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear, I was ready to do the sensible thing and slip out early.
But that would mean missing Kanye West. Given where we’re at in his current hype cycle, I decided to stick around go all out on getting as close to the stage as possible. I’d never seen him before and it’s likely I’ll never again see him at such an interesting point in his career.
When Grizzly Bear finished their set, I pushed forward and began a two hour wait that was arguably more interesting than the show that followed.
At 33, I’m three years younger than Mr West. However, the crowd surrounding the podium from which he performed was significantly younger than both of us. Most of the conversations centered around being at college or looking forward to being at college. Kanye and I were definitely the odd ones out.
Standing in that evershifting crowd of kids both before and during the show gave me the opportunity to observe how they use their smartphones in the wild. Here’s what I learned:
- Battery Preservation. Connectivity is always an issue when you’ve got 40,000 people in a field. A phone struggling for a connection is one that drains battery quickly. I happily switched to airplane mode, ready to enjoy the show, but everyone else was constantly tweaking their brightness settings and launching/killing apps in order to make sure they were both connected and power-efficient. Every time someone performed a task on their phone they would go through this power conservation dance. It struck me that being offline simply wasn’t an option for them - they’d rather have a dead phone than one that’s alive but not connected. The fear of missing out is strong in this generation, to the point that disconnection is intolerable.
- Typing. At times I was surrounded by teen bloggers. They wrote long blog posts on their phones, frequently looking away from the screen to chat while clocking up a respectable number of words per minute. I got the impression that if you put a real keyboard in front of them they’d be as uncomfortable as a Blackberry exec with an iPhone. The tactile keyboard argument is completely irrelevant to this generation.
- Snapchat. This was the one that really struck me. Literally everyone I saw take a photo used Snapchat to share it. Further, no one took a photo without sharing it, and it was always shared with multiple contacts. It was fascinating to see, in the absense of a Snapchat group sharing feature, how they had mastered the multi-person sharing workflow. Different friend group patterns had lodged in their finger muscle memory, making a typically tedious combination of taps and scrolls appear as simple as swipe to unlock. Yes, I’d read that Snapchat users share more photos than Instagram users, and that ephemeral, private sharing is on the rise. But it’s one thing to see information like that on a slide deck, it’s another thing completely to see the stats come alive in front of you. I realized they were effectively spinning up a temporary social network every time they shared a photo - something I’d never considered before.
Here’s my main takeaway:
If you want to truly appreciate tech trends, make the effort to get out from behind the screen and put yourself in the middle of them. Wander through a campus, get on an airplane, or go to an event you wouldn’t normally attend. Skimming slide decks doesn’t come close to seeing trends in action.
