Snapchat, traffic and apple crisp

If you’ve been in downtown Toronto recently, you may have noticed a difference from Wellington. There are more people, of course, but almost everyone scurries along at a furious pace with a plug in one ear and eyes glued to a hand-held smartphone screen. It’s a wonder thousands aren’t obliterated by the passing traffic at every street corner.

My first reaction was: wow, this must be an important place, full of people with urgent business at hand. And then I read about “Snapchat.”

Snapchat, according to The New York Times, is being “embraced as an antidote to a world where every feeling, celebration and life moment is captured to be shared, logged, liked, commented on, stored, searched and sold.” And just what does it do? Messages sent through Snapchat destroy themselves in an instant—or up to 10 seconds—after they are opened (almost like instructions on the old Mission Impossible television show, except they had self-immolating minitapes that only took five seconds to go up in smoke).

From a purely practical standpoint, this sounds like a wonderful development. The last time I checked my email in-box, I had some 1,900 current messages going back to October of 2009. The sheer capacity of the computer to store the darn things is the undoing of my slack attempts to keep my virtual desk clean. What a much better system it would be if the onus were on me to do something with a message before it disappeared on me. (The same thing goes for documents. Thank goodness for the wordsearch function. I often have no idea where I have catalogued or how I have titled a document, so end up calling a phrase to mind and retrieving it the easy way from the bottomless pit that is my computer’s memory.)

You can also clearly see the utlility of the Snapchat program for people—such as teenagers, or fully grown male politicians—who might, or in the latter case, almost invariably do, send messages they will quickly come to regret.

But if Snapchat’s premise is right—that what we value in many transactions is the short lived emotional gratification of contact, rather than the communication of hard information—then maybe a lot of those preoccupied looks we see in the city are really just a facade, a way of concealing the fact that something a lot simpler is going on. Maybe they’re just trying to interact with other people. An old theme, perhaps, dressed up in newer clothes.

And sometimes, those newer clothes just don’t fit well. For example, in the past few days it’s been reported that Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Myers has banned the use of telecommuting, after having studied the data that told her employees working from home were hard to reach and maybe not making the smartest of corporate decisions while wearing their pyjamas and bunny slippers. And a medical marketing company in Toronto, Klick Health, has banned the use of internal email in its offices after concluding that people were hiding behind it to avoid accountability for missing deadlines.

Which perhaps explains why you don’t see many people walking up and down Wellington Main Street wired into their cellphones. We just don’t need them. The old fashioned methods of communication, like the face to face encounter, still work pretty well in a village of 1,700 people.

I’ve always said that if I am bored, all I need to is start my day at one end of Main Street and by late afternoon I may or may not have made it to the other end. You just meet so many people you know. And if more structured contact is what you prefer, we have at least two organizations that put up a regular community dinner, one weekly at the Legion and one biweekly at the Anglican Church; never mind the many other occasional events like the recent chili supper sponsored by the Wellington Women’s Insitute. I enjoy the ability to sit down next to some folks from Consecon I haven’t met before, but after the apple crisp is finished, to say goodbye to them as new friends; or to share a table with our mayor and his wife, and wind up talking to them about vegetarian food rather than water rates.

So I don’t envy those folks in Toronto who risk their lives as pedestrians to stay connected to their smartphones. Maybe Snapchat will encourage them not to take it all so seriously, and look out for traffic instead. Maybe they would like to come out to Wellington for a little more direct human contact—and a lot less traffic— as well as some apple crisp?

David Simmonds’s writing is also available at www.grubstreet.ca.