PGC – There is yet another social media app coming on board to join the not-at-all-saturated-and-dominated market. That app is called Gossip. The app does this, by the CEO’s own words:
“Our product allows users to create and share short voice stories (30s or less) that expire every 7 days – because who wants to listen to the old stuff?”
The app itself is interesting in its temporality, not that you will be immune from archiving if you use this app, but the spirt of the creation itself could be there for what the CEO would hope to be its vast majority audience.
These are two spirits, as I see them, brevity and temporailty.
The spirit of brevity, matches the age we are currently in as far as our primary means of regular communication, and the spirit of temporality, a spirit I would argue we live in though we have strong veneers of the eternal thjat cut us from seeing the nature of the things we create in current year, that awful reality we so desperately want to avoid looking at.
To die is to live, to live is to die.
The app itself is interesting enough to warrant some coverage, but this quote from the CEO is what interested me in writing about this:
“Most of the time the content we are listening to augments our perception of reality.”
Words create internal patterns that set, what I call, our heuristical institutional patternings, our habits of action and supposition that guide and compel us through the overwhelming majority of the actions we take, be it thinking or dialing a number.
This is a recognition of the assumptions of many philosophers regarding the nature of being, whether it is an internal imagining, and thus the place for investigation, or the fruit of an external happening, and thus making the external the place for the investigation into the nature of being.
Of course, there are many hybrids of these assumptions and one would guess, perhaps, that this CEO of Gossip might very well one of these hybrids, those that dance between the internal possible and external possible of being. Plato, it could be argued (and has) had his own balancing act he held between the nature of being, which was not purely logical, observational, nor was it relative, there were absolutes.
Plato’s absolutes are ideals that you don’t dare define too particularly lest you become reduced by them until you no longer exist in them, they wholly exist in you.
So, if our Gossip CEO does reside somewhere in the midst of the internal and the external as to the origin of selfness within our observational senses, then I give this project a good chance of succeeding, but if the CEO is all-too-external-assuming, then Gossip will meat the heavy maw of moral authority in short order.
The reason I put him in this category is because of his quote, where he refers to the content outside the self as an augmentation to our reality, but not the full definer of it. This does not mean, from one quote, you can deduce this man walks between internal and external, it only means he said nothing in this interview to suggest otherwise, and that quote perfectly sums up the position he seems to take.
This is very important for a small start-up with a CEO willing to put his narrative on their brand. The idea itself is snapchatty, but perhaps the longer life will attract people that will do what he seems to hope the app will do for people, create good ephemera that can help their bodies calibrate positively in the world around them. If your content is affirming, your day just might be affected by that pattern as well.
“The content we listen to augments our perception of reality”, said Gleb Braverman, Gossip Inc. CEO
From hackernoon.com
2021-08-05 15:53:19
Excerpt:
HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.
My background is in augmented reality. I’m passionate about products where users can share what they experience, and how they feel – this is something I was working on before I started Gossip, which is also augmented reality, just in a different way.
Most of the time the content we are listening to augments our perception of reality.
If we are listening to a funny story, we might leave a bigger tip to the waiter or grant an extra smile.
