An older lady ranted to me recently about how technology is ruining our lives. She listed the usual trite points:
I began to think on the third point and ponder on what has changed over the years. Questions like:
To some degree, technology has exacerbated some of our traits and stretched them to extremes. People are addicted to their phones more than ever due to technology companies leveraging our human nature and some of these companies are now combating the very pain they initially caused.
The other side of this coin is also true, technology has helped humanity in tremendous ways in industries such as health, communication, lifestyle and so on.
But this essay is not about the pros and cons of technology or the nuances of good and bad tech, it's about what lies at the intersection of our interests and how technology is helping us realise this more than we perceive.
A broad overview would show that a large portion of our everyday lives are not cinematic blockbuster events. Yet, we as humans love stories and for every narrative or anecdote in any conversation, the listeners are eager to get to the interesting parts as quickly as possible. Sometimes there are interesting parts, most times there are not.
Sure, you could try to sieve your story to identify which parts would be interesting to narrate but the effort is probably futile because there’s a small overlap of what’s interesting to you and what’s interesting to me. And how many people can you do this for? How many different sieves do you need for a case by case basis?
Here’s the good news, social media massively helps alleviate all of this. To be more precise, ‘stories’ on Snapchat, Instagram, and elsewhere help you engage in interesting conversations. ‘Stories’ help get to the good bits faster, they minimise small talk and they increase the quality by some order of magnitude. This effect is where ‘Opt-In Conversations’ come in and I’ll explain what this means but first some more context.
Intermittent friendships are often guilty of small talk. You know, the conversations that start with ‘how have you been?’ — the vague question plaguing every adult traversing through life. To illustrate, have you ever had a conversation that goes like this:
“Hey, long time. How are you?”
“Hey, yes it has been. I’m doing well and you? You still working/doing [insert company]?”
…Mundane conversation continues…
“We should catch up when you’re in town.”
Never happens.
(Though I’ve come to realise this is probably more of a British cultural thing).
Intermittent friendships via Instant Messaging allow you to catch up every now and then which can be fine but responses often appear rehearsed. The issue is, to have a really meaningful conversation, it takes a while to wade through the trite parts and because time is a limited resource, the really interesting conversations hardly manifest.
This is where Opt-In conversations become really useful.
Opt-In conversations allow you to opt-in at a particular moment of a person’s life-timeline and have a conversation about that fragment rather than start from scratch.
Suppose you watched tiny video clips of my day on Snapchat and clip 3 seems to be of particular interest to you, you can opt-in to have a conversation at that particular point rather than going for the whole ride. Opting in at that particular point means we have both crossed into the threshold of an engaging conversation with little or no effort.
Never in the history of humanity have you ever had the opportunity to skip to a part of your friend’s life that interests you until now.
If I filmed tiny bits of my day and shared them with a close group of friends (through Instagram/Snapchat stories), you do not need to ask me how my day was and listen to my speech of events, you can just go straight to the bit that interests you and have a conversation about it.
The best way to tell your friends how your day was is to show them.
There is a shift taking place in the way we converse. It’s no longer an interrogation or an inquisition but an opt-in strategy in which you can jump on and off at the points you wish.
If you have friends that often try to catch up with you from scratch — “hey long time” — it is probably more useful for them to follow you on platforms where you post stories. Conversations become more fluid and there is no need to wade through small talk to have a conversation.
To bring it full circle, the older lady’s rant about people trying to capture every moment is a result of the shift in which conversations are happening online, people are not just texting each other, they are conversing via pictures and video. In certain situations, her third point “People hardly talk to each other anymore, they prefer to be on their phones” would also prove to be true, but this is just a manifestation of what humans really want — To engage in things that interest them, and often the most interesting conversations are happening on their phone and not with the person in front of them.
I would also go as far as to argue that it is much harder to ignore people in front of you (dinners, meetups etc) in which you regularly have opt-in conversations with, as there’s so much to talk about or reminisce [2].
As a last point, one thing I encourage friends to do is to post something to their ‘story’ at least once a week. Doesn’t matter what it is, it just has to be interesting to you. It gives you the opportunity to catch up with people without even trying as it becomes a pull rather than a push conversation. It’s a simple hack to be in touch with people you care about with other added benefits which I’ll talk about some time in the future.
Feature request for Snapchat/Instagram-
A question a couple of my friends posed to me is this:
I have written previously [3] about the ideas of how Snapchat’s features are more groundbreaking than people realise but now I think we’re going to see those ideas become conspicuous once Zuckerberg brings Facebook to its next manifestation.
Though I do think Mark is doubling down on execution rather than the idea itself. The idea is simply this: there is a disconnect between the way people talk in real life and how they talk online. The closer you can get people to real-life scenarios, the better. Ephemeral stories are just one part of it. What about ephemeral group chats? Ephemeral groups and so on.
[1] Important to note here that these are just examples of a tiny subset of conversations and conversations vary from trivial to very important. Especially in negative contexts but “interesting” cuts across the spectrum regardless of type.
[2] This is not to say you should use your phone to ignore those whom you don’t have those conversations with, that would be rude.
[3] I know, I know. This is bordering on ridiculous. I’ve got Fan love for Snapchat as DJ Khaled calls it.
Thanks to Akin and Olamide for reading drafts of this