... out of mind

Happily in time for this column, Douglas Rushkoff recently wrote about Snapchat's rather strange attempt to post news stories. I don't have a Snapchat account so I can't claim to understand the entire picture, but apparently for about a year now Snapchat has had a feature that permits its users to share items that appear in the news. Again, if I understand correctly (and I admit that I may have the details wrong), the platform has teamed with various news services that send out tweet-like messages to subscribers. And why is this strange? What makes Snapchat different from other social networks is that the images that users receive vanish after a few seconds. In other words, you get a quickie heads-up which I suppose invites you to click into a fuller report ... if you have the attention span for a fuller report. Rushkoff asks what it means when "news", the things that happen in the world that all too often critically affect our lives, meets the "forget about this quick" mindset of Snapchat. He writes:

The entire media empire Snapchat is building is based on ephemerality. Everything is fleeting, intentionally. Nothing sticks. That's precisely what Snapchat was for: so that you could take photos or write messages, send them, and have them disappear. That's the bias of these media platforms.
The original invention of text did the opposite. With text, we got to write down history (that's when "history" as we know it, began). We also got accountability: some of the very first documents ever written are contracts. Text let us write stuff down now that we could be held to account for in the future. Disappearing text and pictures dissolves our accountability.
So socially, what does it mean when people are no longer held to account for anything? We get revisionist history for everything: that happened, no it didn't, yes it did but it happened like this. What does it mean for a generation to grow up in [a] world where everything they write simply disappears?
The problem, of course, is that when we're dealing with crap, relating to it as ephemeral may even be a positive thing. And then we learn to relate to things that aren't crap, things that truly matter, in the same way. My basic fear here is that, as Rushkoff puts it, living in the stream "dissolves our accountability". As seems to be happening all too often in the Boidem, somebody else has said it before, and better than, me.



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