Had a pretty awesome fancy dinner with Nora yesterday and just went over some of the notes I took during the time. One thing I noted was the following:
“It’s all about expectations. Restricting them can ease communication; Snapchat is a great example”.
I am so glad I added that example because I had no idea what I was talking about until I reached that part of the quote. Oh, past Manoj, so cryptic.
Ah yes, me and Nora both tried out Snapchat for the first time yesterday. We struggled a little bit, but after a few minutes, Nora was lost in the abyss of Snapchats. Thus rooted is this conversation of why Snapchat is so addicting and why a text message can’t just be used for stuff like that.
The idea that I was going for is that each medium creates a set of expectations of how meaningful the messages sent through it should be. The higher the expectations of meaning, the more time we spend thinking about our message and eventually deciding to perhaps not send anything at all because, well fuck, coming up with something meaningful to say all the time is hard.
However, if the expectations of the medium are very low in terms of the meaning of a message, aka Snapchat, Twitter, or the Yo app, then you got a plethora of communication, albeit, arguably meaningless.
But sometimes, that’s all you want…to communicate with someone without any particular meaning other than the fact that you just felt like communicating with them for that moment.