Snapchat
This is the worst offender. My daughters Alora & Brittan
love it, but it's like texting that disappears. So we're
encouraging habitual forgetting? And those images and messages
don't really go away. You just lose access to them. Snapchat
keeps them on their servers, forever. Cara got into the fun of
the filters that include placenames for a while, so I followed
her back onto the app before we left for Europe. I still don't
like it. It's frustrating and I find myself screenshotting
everything the kids send me, which is apparently bad form.
But don't take it from me. Here's Mark Cuban
explaining
why downloading Snapchat is a huge mistake.
Facebook
Facebook is the app your parents are on. It's where they get
information because you don't call anymore. Facebook also has
an army of the brightest people in the world trying to
manipulate you into staying on the app for as long as they can.
Notifications draw you back in and you wake up out of a daze
hours later not knowing where the time went. It is personalized,
curated, and optimized to manipulate you. It's been years since
I had the app on my phone and I try to stay off of it, letting
my tweeting feed into it for all those older relatives who
enjoy it. Cara still uses it extensizely, so sometimes I'll get
drawn back in.
Facebook Messanger is, however, one of the better apps for
international communication. Since it's always a one on one
conversation though, Facebook can do a lot less to draw you in
and I'm not sure how they're monetizing it becasue I don't see
ads either.
Instagram
Facebook owns Instagram. I thought about going back to it when I
went to a family reunion and everyone under 30 said they used it
"instead" of Facebook. But why do I need to keep up with another
app? I don't. I recently read about how avant garde
Amalia Ulman
is storming the art world with her photographic creations
released in the app. That's how they draw you in.
LinkedIn
When I joined LinkedIn in 2008 it was invite only and it led me
landing a job at Experian. I maintain a LinkedIn profile because
in the professional world it's now expected of me. It hasn't
been useful in a job search since 2008, but the recruiter spam
I get in the app has certainly increased over time. Recruiters shell
out thousands per year per seat for the power to see, search and
connect with you. They are the customers. We are the product. No
wonder Microsoft bought them.
Twitter
I love Twitter. If you know me you probably already know that
about me. Twitter makes me dumber. Twitter makes me less able to
communicate in long form, as my thoughts try to conform to
expression in the 140 character constraint. When I first started
using Twitter I noticed how profoundly diminished my conversational
ability was because of it. But that was before social media went
mainstream. It has changed the way everyone interacts. Twitter
pushes curation just like Facebook, to show you only posts that
are more likely to keep you in the app so they can show you ads.
Twitter, however, tells you when they're doing it and let's you
opt out. Increasingly though I have to opt out every time I
open the app anew. Their stock price is flagging, so it's
understandable and inevitable they'll follow the master manipulators at
Facebook further down that dark path.
Pokémon Go
How can this be on the list you might wonder? There is no in-app
communication between users. You can't trade or chat or anything.
Cara got me playing Pokémon Go (seeing a pattern yet of
the curmudgeon being drug into the future by hiw tech savvy wife?)
and we've taken more long walks together since then than at any
other period in our lives. You can pick out the other people
playing the game pretty easily, and we talk to eachother -
random strangers at the park. The conversations are driven by
the app just like any other social media, but not confined to the
screen because Pokémon Go is the first truly mainstream
virtual reality.
So how is that horrible? I now see the world through the eyes of
the app.
Could that sculpture be a pokéstop? Are there any gyms
nearby? What's at that restuarant? Nothing? This one has a
pokéstop, let's go there. And we are twain from those
not playing, who now live outside our world despite being all
around us.
|