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Snapchat, the social network where messages remain for a few hours, will include a service, Memories, where you can store videos and photos. A small revolution for one of the company most frequented by teenagers around the world. Anyone thinks that there is a possible contradiction between this decision and the famous words of the founder, according to which “we no longer capture the real world and recreate it online. Simply we live and communicate at the same time. ” Instead, the decision is integrated in the basic philosophy and both tell us something important about the nature and evolution of the world of communication.
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San Tommano
rELATED First of all, the basic philosophy. Evan Spiegel, founder of the app, is not St. Thomas nor Charles Peirce, and is unlikely to have read them, yet says something very similar: living coincides with communicating. Communication comes from communis actio, action done together, and Thomas defines it as a peculiar characteristic of God. In the Trinity all is friendship or communication. More profanely, Charles Peirce – and after him a great number of thinkers – said that the whole of reality is full of signs, it is composed of signs and communicates itself as a sign. All that we understand the reality, in fact, we can grasp only thanks to the fact that the whole of reality imposes itself on us not mechanically or immediately but through a representation on which we can work with our mind and that we can interpret. There are many types of sign: we understand the mood of a person smile or eyes, we understand how to go to the station due to a sign, we understand a conception of the world through the words of a book. According to Thomas, but also according to Peirce, we can even understand that there is God Himself through the reading of the sign that is the order of the world.
What Spiegel says in its systematic conception recalls this ancient wisdom . And ‘reality itself which is communicative. Communication is not a time added due to certain purposes, often manipulative. The reality, and therefore every human action, communicating by nature. In this sense, social networks have brought to light an ancient feature, coming from misunderstanding that wants the reality of objects, how to know and communication as three separate moments. Like any other previous technology – the writing, printing, photography, radio, television, cinema, web 1.0 – it reveals the communicative nature of reality, accentuating certain sides, for example, in this case, the ability to share and participation. You lose something in the meantime? It’s dangerous? Yes, of course, as it was the invention of writing and printing: with writing we have lost the values and types of oral culture memory (the work of Walter Ong explained it), and we have bought other, different, often analytical. It is given the option of publishing pornographic works and even the Bible or the “Starry Messenger”. Every new technology has advantages and disadvantages, but all reveal the original communicative reality and somehow deepen.
Why is it relevant in this context the Memories service Snapchat? The new service makes it clear that to live is to communicate but the experience may not be limited to the immediate reaction and dispense with the past. The past is the only place where one can go to get the meanings that allow him to imagine or construct a thought different from the one that imposes the fashion or the power of the moment. In fact, every totalitarian power always seeks to alter the knowledge of history, because everything can be in perfect harmony with what it decides at the time, to prevent that one can find alternatives. I do not know if the choice of Snapchat, in addition to easy commercial and advertising purposes, there is a desire to open up to a more adult audience, to try to become a means of communication for all ages. But the move, is going in this direction because what distinguishes an adult is the ability to keep the links with the past, without finish everything in the immediacy of the present, which immediately cancels. To live is to communicate but the cut or retain links with the past decides the kind of life of which you are talking about.
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