Dad, you have to sign up for Snap, if you want to reach me.” What’s wrong with phones? “You don’t answer when I call.” That’s probably because I can’t hear it ring in my back pocket or I’m in a meeting. Just text me. “Dad, if you don’t hear your phone ring, you’re not going to hear an SMS chime.” Okay, that’s fair. You can always email me. “What? No! Dad, none of us emails.” Rrright, you need the ‘instant’ part of instant messaging. “Dad, I’ll sign you up for Snap and you can call, text or send pics and vids. All the cool people do it here.”
All of a sudden, I feel cool, again, because I wasn’t before. My daughter signed me up, logged me in and created an avatar for me. Okay, now what? She snapped me. It worked! I sent one back, but realized the first message she sent me disappeared. What happened? “They disappear.” Why? “They just do, it’s call disappearing messages.” Why wouldn’t the entire conversation be kept? “Because nobody looks back at old messages; they only want to see the new ones.” OK. Weird. Now who are all these people that are suddenly in my friend suggestions? “They are your friends from other platforms.” Wow. Some I haven’t spoken to in years. But why are they on this cool A-list app, I condescended.
Like WhatsApp, which doesn’t appeal to my daughter, she only goes to the platform where her friends use. So what about Facebook? I asked. “Eww, dad. FB is for old people like grandma who want to see pictures of grandkids.” Oh. Clearly, I’ve been learned.
She signed me up on Snap and I have a grand total of one friend on it: her.
It really didn’t matter to me what platform my daughter used. She signed me up on Snap and I have a grand total of one friend on it: her. It’s my tether to her. And I’m just glad that I’m still in her sphere of important people whom she feels she can include in her uber-selective list of contacts.
I still use emails since it is the way I keep an email-trail and records for business and personal work. I use SMS also to connect with my friends mainly for meet up details as texting is still a universal platform. And I occasionally use other overseas platforms including WeChat. From time to time, I dip into FB to see if there are new births and deaths because, well, old people use it to catch up on month-old birthdays and anniversaries.
In any event, I’ll use whatever platform my close circle of contacts uses and let’s just say, between, FB, Snapchat, Insta, WeChat and WhatsApp I have no favorites since I belong to multiple demographics and I am unlikely going to move one group of contacts to another. Nor would I want to merge my worlds of peeps. Now, I feel so cool, I don’t even know where to post first!
