Apple didn’t invent ‘face time’

In the first of two instalments about the concept of ‘face time’, staff writer Stu Bradley discovers the origins of the phrase.

Maybe thinking you’re supposed to have a life is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life is supposed to be. How do we know that all of these people with ‘no lives’ aren’t really on the new frontier of human sentience and perceptions? I only need 2 hours of people a day. I can get by on that amount. 2 hours of FaceTime.

The above quotation is taken from Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs. First published almost twenty years ago, the novel is eerily prescient in its comments about the start-up scene. Or maybe, since GQ described it as being “about as zeitgeisty as it gets”, the start-up scene just hasn’t changed for twenty years. Either way, I can’t recommend the novel enough.

One of the key ideas in Microserfs is the concept of “face time”, a term Coupland coined long before Apple did. The fact that Apple now use the term to describe video calling is hideously ironic. If anything has changed in the start-up scene it is the social side of things, a process that Coupland articulates as having begun in the 90s:

I can’t stop marvelling at how together geeks are in the Valley… you’re supposed to have an exciting, value-adding job that utilises your creativity, a wardrobe from Nordstrom’s or at the very least Banana Republic, a $400,000 house, a cool European or Japanese car, the perfect relationship with someone as ambitious, smart, and well-dressed as yourself, and extra money to throw parties so that the whole world can observe what a life you have.

In an overzealous move to shake off the image of geeks as socially inept, sexless and dowdy, the tech scene now hosts some of the biggest and best parties in the world. The only difference between them and the WMC is that no one live tweets Steve Angello’s DJ set. (At least, God, I hope not.)

The other day a friend tweeted about failing to see the value of events like SXSW and Social Media Week for employers, only to be bombarded by people extolling the virtues of them. When we next spoke, he argued that (like so many children trying to convince their parents of the benefits of a puppy) employees only try to convince employers to sign their proverbial permission slip so they can go hang out with the cool kids. Thus, the question of the day: do we have too much FaceTime?

I decided to check out the website for SXSW, imagining that I was making plans to go. The first thing I noticed was that my energy drink of choice, Monster Energy, were sponsoring and immediately thought of all the free cans I’ll be missing out on. Like, they’ll probably have to borrow one of those planes that UNICEF uses to deliver food parcels.

There are also a ton of bands playing (Braid, The Shins and This Will Destroy You to name a few) that I would want to check out. By the time I eventually got around to looking at the tech and social side of things, I was already nearing saturation point. The listings for tech and social talks didn’t help.

Of the hundreds of talks, some stood out (Frank Abagnale, the man behind Catch Me If You Can, talking about how life has the potential to be fascinating) while others simply seemed to be on the same old stuff: the rise of female bloggers, building networks on Twitter, social media trends. I mean, really.

By happy accident, I’ve had some very diverse invitations (from some Social Media Week London talks to an event primarily aimed at fashion and beauty bloggers) sent my way so I’m planning to test just how valuable they are. I’ll be speaking to a few people about the success, or lack of it, they’ve had at events, and I’d also like to crowdsource some opinions on events, so leave comments here or tweet me if you have strong opinions on the subject.

Sadly, I won’t be going to hang out with the other plaid shirt wearing beardy guys at SXSW, unless I can convince the Kernel overlords that I could really, really use the FaceTime.