Charles ‘Chuck’ Walter stands on the front patio of Little Brittany, a cute and delicate Brickell pub, where food, cars and perfume – and just about everything – shines near the waterfront, south of Downtown, in miami
He smiles almost constantly, while he receives guests who arrive to share Brickell Tech Tuesday, an event that Chuck created in order to generate networks and contact ties among technology enthusiasts who roam these sumptuous places.
It’s 7:00 p.m., and the host’s eyes go from one side to the other. They only find calm when the musicians appear: a drummer, a bassist and a saxophonist, the three blacks, in honor of the fact that we are in the month of the history of Afro-descendants. From 8:00 to 9:00 p.m. they will play jazz, and it’s very good.
The truth is that Walter organizes these meetings, the last Tuesday of each month, because he seeks to strengthen relations between those who have similar interests and live in the same geographical area.
That is why he also created FriendApp, an application with which the user can organize his contacts according to what he has in common with each one of them, the times in which they can share meetings, the distance at which they are.
His perspective regarding platforms and applications based on intelligent algorithms is complex; On the one hand, he fully understands that, in the attention economy, almost everything we have on our mobile tries to attract us in such a way that we forget that there is a physical world outside the rectangle that we increasingly look at.
But, nevertheless, bet on an application that, leveraged on the mobile or the other screens we use, does not allow us to return to the personal, close, melee encounter.
“I started to wonder how many people, the ones I have on Instagram and Facebook, I really know. Then, in addition – he explains in very good Spanish, I learned while working at Univisión, inherited from his Cuban mother and practiced with his Colombian ex-wife – I got divorced, so I started using dating apps, but I saw that they were too specific and here on Brickell didn’t insert me. So I got to work.”
Chuck combines anthropological arguments with spontaneous ideas regarding the way in which social networks and advances in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) affect our behavior.
He is aware that big cities, with their entanglements and traffic jams (especially in urbanizations like Miami, where the car is the absolute protagonist in the lives of the inhabitants), does not encourage the interaction of the neighbors. But he also knows that, to know who lives walled in the middle, a certain willingness is needed, let’s say, of the spirit itself.
“Now, although I can’t avoid the car, I started using a bicycle, to connect more with people, places, and enjoy the city. Also, in Miami it is much more pleasant to walk, ”she says, interspersing responses with greetings and warm words with everyone.
In the context described, FriendApp is a half business venture, half philanthropic. Doing it in Miami allows him to “balance between being in front of the computer programming, having virtual meetings, and all that, but also disconnecting, going to the beach, taking a walk.”
For now, the application is available for IOS (Apple) and offers a beta version (testing and adjustment stage) for Android.
But Charles’s dream is that in a few months FriendApp will allow us, for example, to organize our relationships in such a way that we are clear with whom and why we are going to meet simply by walking fifteen minutes – an idea that comes from current urbanism, which proposes to return to walk the city and give importance to people and physical proximity for the meeting.
“The platform economy and the gig economy – remote, on-demand and short-term jobs – have made us believe that connecting by video call is the same as meeting in the office or wherever. But jobs, like schools, are meeting places. And the numbers indicate that we are increasingly alone”, reason Walter.
Next, remember that before smartphones became lords and masters of life in society, we spent more time in common spaces of physical exchange, in real life. But “now, for security reasons or still the arguments of the covid-19, we cannot even enter the schools to look for our children. It seems that everything can be solved with technology, but it is not true”.
Think community. But the real community. That is the purpose of Charles Walter.
With FriendApp almost as if it gave a drink of its own medicine to what made the swarm of cross-relationships, extended in a completely disordered geography, lock us in bubbles of few and acquaintances that reject those who we label with standardized categories.
He pauses. Eat slowly, promote that those of us who meet in the pub know about each other.
Redefining ICTs is not an easy task. Much less get us to pay attention to who lives near us, that person who occasionally takes a place in the elevator and, if we lose sight of community ties, probably makes us uncomfortable.
Perhaps FriendApp is the beginning of a new Era in the applications that govern our relationships. There is much to see, but the beginning is auspicious.
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