It's interesting to hear everyone saying 'ah, I'm too old for Snapchat'. At face value I feel that way too, but I think there's something more going on here.
Snapchat strikes me as a really unique modality. It's not really a message type that we can draw some kind of lineage back to PARC or Bell Labs or whatever. Slack follows a familiar pattern of 'oh yeah, that's just like IRC and they had those running on Altos a million years ago'. SMS, yeah that's just chat. And so on...
Was there a Snapchat equivalent back in the dark ages of networked computers? Not that I'm familiar with (although I'd love to see an example). I think that fact points to a meaningful difference between the computer that's in your hand or your pocket all the time and the 'workstation' that's on your desk. A computer that's always with you can deliver different kinds of messages and project different kinds of presence from other people you know. I hope Snapchat is just the beginning of this.
Snapchat doesn't have some kind of physical equivalency like a book or a note on the fridge. I don't think appreciating that is necessarily pegged to age, but more to openness. Snapchat is just legitimately unfamiliar and unusual. From afar, I think that's great.
Seems kind of like Zwrite: text-only, ephemeral messages. It was just text that appeared in your terminal session. My friends and I used it in (engineering) grad school in the late 90's.
"Oh, yeah, that's just like seeing someone in person and not recording anything about that conversation, and they had that on people a million years ago."
I agree with your view and I'm still too old. Being old is more of a reason of not having a group of friends on SC. I'm sure I could pick it up the weird app but, for me it's a medium I need to experience with real friends and I don't see that happening
Snapchat strikes me as a really unique modality. It's not really a message type that we can draw some kind of lineage back to PARC or Bell Labs or whatever. Slack follows a familiar pattern of 'oh yeah, that's just like IRC and they had those running on Altos a million years ago'. SMS, yeah that's just chat. And so on...
Was there a Snapchat equivalent back in the dark ages of networked computers? Not that I'm familiar with (although I'd love to see an example). I think that fact points to a meaningful difference between the computer that's in your hand or your pocket all the time and the 'workstation' that's on your desk. A computer that's always with you can deliver different kinds of messages and project different kinds of presence from other people you know. I hope Snapchat is just the beginning of this.
Snapchat doesn't have some kind of physical equivalency like a book or a note on the fridge. I don't think appreciating that is necessarily pegged to age, but more to openness. Snapchat is just legitimately unfamiliar and unusual. From afar, I think that's great.