The World Would be a Better Place if We [DELETED]
Note to Self
WNYC Studios
4.7 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 5 February 2014
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Let's embrace the delete key, and imagine a world where all our e-clutter wasn't just auto archived by big corporations.
When you send a someone a message on Snapchat, for instance, the recipient has just a few seconds to digest the content before it vanishes. The social media service popular with millenials flies in the face of the autosave function that has dominated computing since the 1980s. And that is precisely why it is booming in popularity.
This week New Tech City explores whether it's time for an auto-delete revolution. Host Manoush Zomorodi talks to experts from a email folder's worth of extremely smart people with niche expertises to find out how clicking 'delete' more would affect our memories, the environment, our relationships, and more. Plus, a prolific college-age Snapchatter explains why he loves when the photos and videos he sends to his friends just disappear. Don't worry, this podcast won't self-destruct in five seconds.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, friend. This is an episode of Note to Self, but from when we used to be called New Text City. Same good content. Just the old name. Enjoy. |
| 0:11.0 | Sean Howfler is a senior at Yale University, and he loves the new messaging app SnapChat. |
| 0:17.1 | If I see something funny or interesting, or if I want to let my girlfriend know what I'm thinking, |
| 0:23.3 | I'll send her a picture of my face. |
| 0:25.9 | You see, Sean likes it so much because everything he sends on Snapchat vanishes just seconds after it's |
| 0:32.8 | opened. It lets you be like less self-conscious about what you send. So I think people on Facebook |
| 0:41.1 | are very self-aware of what content they put on it because they know that it's permanent and they |
| 0:46.3 | know that people look at that content all the time and sometimes judge you based on that content. |
| 0:52.1 | So knowing something will automatically be deleted can change what we actually say to each other, |
| 0:58.0 | the entire way that we interact. Today on New Text City, we embrace the delete key and question |
| 1:04.8 | our auto-save habits. I'm a new Samarote, this is New Text City, and come along as we travel around |
| 1:12.6 | the nation and actually the world to ask people each with very different niche expertise. What's up |
| 1:19.3 | with our computers, our email accounts, and our phones automatically saving everything? |
| 1:25.4 | For example, right now I'm going to delete this message in my Gmail account on my iPhone and |
| 1:31.9 | look at here, it automatically gets archived, not trashed. It's how many of the companies we rely on |
| 1:38.7 | work, but let's ask a crazy question. What would happen if they didn't save so much? |
| 1:45.2 | For environmental reasons? For sanity reasons? For societal reasons? |
| 1:51.6 | And actually, it's not that crazy a question. Snapchat is waking in new customers like Sean |
| 1:57.6 | Halfler, so many customers that they famously snubbed Facebook's $3 billion offer to buy them, |
| 2:04.9 | and that competitors like confide, wink, clipchat are popping up too trying to trade in on being |
| 2:11.4 | more ephemeral. Maybe we should end auto-save and replace it with a grand purge, |
| 2:19.2 | or maybe this is just a really stupid idea. Let's find out. So do you think that you and your |
... |
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