The Snapchat seance
I swear I wouldn't have paid it any mind had it not been for the visual cacophony1 like an emergency siren in my peripheral vision. The corner of my right eye begged the rest of my head to turn and face the flurry. I don't want to misguide you into thinking I didn't want to look or that I needed to look straight ahead for some heretofore unspecified reason that I plan to melodramatically reveal or anything of that sort. Rather I was, well, a cocktail of after-effects: one part hungover from our night in NYC and one part dealing with something I'll call trainbrain which falls somewhere within the same genus as mallbrain with its accompanying perfume-laden fogginess of thought and slightly dreamy visual field. Although maybe substitute the olfactory barrage of bergamot, lily, freesia, and lavender with a more straightforwardly unpleasant but not altogether worse mixture of new luggage, mildewy sweat, and canola oil from the mixed nuts I had just bagged from the bodega near Penn Station. The nuts weren't bad.
All of which is to say I had no reason not to look.2 And besides, I consider people watching a primary telos of humanity.3 And so like a rubber band snapping I swiveled my head right a bit more rapidly than what could be considered normal or natural. I saw two girls — early teens by the look of it — engaged in some spasmodic ritual4 that looked like Brownian motion to an outside spectator such as myself.5
To describe it as the strangest behavior I had ever seen wouldn't be that far off. It was a 2x speed cycle of manic scrolling, tapping, positioning, re-positioning, re-re-positioning, and frantic tapping. Again, all committed with the kind of zeal you'd associate with medium-stakes casino gambling or perhaps emergency surgery or even perhaps a combination of the two that involves the surgeon but on whichever substances of choice the medium-stakes gambler happened to pick up from his usual dealer (not the casino dealer, of course).
Long before that moment — at least, measured in 2x time units — I had made maybe the only inferential connection I could hold onto as outsider. Oh I knew Snapchat when I saw it. This was, though, something different. The complex angles, economy of movement, sheer dexterity. It was as if Snapchat had its own parkour.
Suddenly, the nearer snapchatter whisked her phone — with swanlike grace, of course — vertically above her head and snapped one of what could only be a close-up of her hair in aerial view. The recipient, one must imagine, had better appreciate this vanishingly short-lived limited edition, which I admit only shamefully I would like to call “Hairial View” for obvious reasons.
Questions — nonsensical in their urgency — flooded my mind. Not any that I would ask the snapchatters themselves. That would be weird and, not to mention, interrupt something that for all I knew could be the quasi-religious equivalent of a high holiday. You wouldn’t stop Santa midway down the chimney to ask him if he preferred snickerdoodle to chocolate chip, now would you?
Oh but yes, the qualm that had by now stolen my focus. They — they meaning the snapchattters — operated at such a speed that they — again, the snapchatters — could not possibly have ample enough time to check the selfies before sending. It was at such a speed that would allow only subliminal projections on the retina, at best. So, and maybe it's my mistake in even trying to impart logic here, they must've possessed a complete indifference. That is, they didn't care what the pictures of themselves they sent even looked like or how someone on the receiving end would think about what they looked like. Such a pure sensibility suggested that they lived in a prelapsarian state, so completely unburdened by self consciousness that the only, and I mean only, reasonable explanation must point to the many worlds hypothesis and specifically a world before the sinful consumption of the forbidden fruit and seeing of good and evil and falling from grace and all that fun stuff.
Then I began to consider what it would be like. Total lack of self consciousness. So completely engaged with every atom of your being. One with Snapchat.
I knew I lacked the faculties to even imagine such a state. It’s not as if I hadn’t used Snapchat before. The reality is, instead, that I hadn't used Snapchat.6 The rich tapestry of behavior that weaves itself on top of this simple piece of technology. Maybe and probably I had even used all the features, but I knew with finality on this train ride to the Hamptons that I had never actually used Snapchat before and I probably never would.
What I observed on this ride was no less than a religious experience. It resembled a digital revivalist meeting — everyone7 submerged in the iconography, tradition, and liturgy of Snapchat. The act, while familiar, was emotional and spiritual dynamite, accessible only to those within the congregation. It was, I have since come to realize, the collective effervescence of an entire generation. A kind of electric, spiritual zest that emanates from the communion of souls around a single piece of technology.
And so now I was left to reconcile this with the decrying of older generations about how technology has turned us into a generation of isolated zombies, eyes glued to the screen, souls drifting in the cloud somewhere. Yet, these snap-sorcerers were anything but isolated; they were in it, deep in some next-level social sanctum, living a shared experience on a five-inch screen. Could it just be that Emile Durkheim’s collective effervescence got a software update?
Collective effervescence is, after all, about that rush you get when you're part of something bigger than your lone-wolf self. Could be a rock concert, a protest rally, or heck, even an app where pics disappear faster than dignity at a high school prom.8 And here’s the kicker: maybe the kids who’ve turned Snapchat into a seance of split-second human connection are the spiritual gurus we never knew we needed. Call it sacred, call it profane, but it’s their cathedral of the here and now, with stories and snaps as their new-age stained glass, illuminating the human experience one click at a time.
"Visual cacophony" is the sort of term one cooks up after an expensive liberal arts education and a handful of anthropology or philosophy courses, yet it's eerily accurate here. Trust me, your eyes would've been screaming too.
And indeed I had every hindsight reason to look. It's a narrative essay; if I didn't want to look, you wouldn't be reading about it. The irony of writing this down is itself a palpable form of “wanting to look.”
"Telos" — a Greek term that you'll nod your head at as if you fully understand, but really, you're just glad it's not another Latin root. It's philosophy's way of asking, "What's the point?"
It’s an industry term.
For clarification purposes, I don't mean outside as in merely not involved but more in the sense of outside Zoomer culture like in the way an alien would watch a tomato-faced man yell at his steering wheel because he was just cut off by someone reinforced by his own hunk of moving metal merrily driving whilst listening to Taylor Swift.
For more on the Platonic Form “Use Snapchat,” please refrain from asking me anything directly or indirectly.
Everyone being, of course, not just the two teenage girls but the entirety of the socioreligious graph linking arms via Snapchat.
Not speaking from my own experience.