Mar 17 - How An App Made Me Want To Fling My Phone Out The Window

Written by YGTV Team on 17 March 2015.

By Stefano Blanca Sciacaluga

If you know me you’ll know I’m signed up to every social media site. I Facebook, Tweet, Vine, Instagram, Snap and I’ve questioned the usefulness of LinkedIn on more than one hundred occasions but still kept a profile on there. I’m not obsessed with social media but as I mentioned somewhere else, I am extremely interested in how people interact on the Internet; so I try everything. In fact, there’s nothing I like more than browsing the App Store on my iPhone or iPad and finding something interesting. For free, of course, I rarely pay; I’m that kind of person.

And I like to think I’m in control: I keep my follows on Twitter and Instagram to a manageable amount (because I don’t wanna miss a thing), I regularly get rid of people on Facebook whom I NEVER interact with and if I don’t recognise your Snapchat handle and you’re not replying to my “who are you” Snaps you’re gone, quick (actually this has only happened twice, I’m not that popular). But I still like to “keep in touch”, I like to read about what people are doing and I like finding new ways in which people are communicating.

I’m not one to use dating sites or apps, I don’t see the point beyond getting a few drinks in with friends and looking for Gibraltarians on Tinder for a laugh. I mean, I don’t use these things seriously. So when I saw someone on Twitter mention Fling I didn’t really pay much attention. “It must be another Tinder”, I thought. But being the sucker for Origami and paper planes that I am its logo got me. So I looked into it in the app store:

“Send a photo, video or text out to the world. Up to 50 random people will receive it”

So it’s not a dating app, but of course it might have the same content that things like Chatroulette are famous for and Snapchat was meant to be. But I like the idea of sending out things to the world, and having grown up on the Internet, nothing can scare me; I’ve seen it all. So I put my App Store password in and within two or three minutes I’m sending a “Fling” out to the world, 50 people to be precise, a photo of Dwight Schrute from The Office. The app asks me if it can send me notifications, I agree and almost instantly I receive a couple. Then some more I’m thinking it’s pretty cool, I even recommend it to a friend on account of seeing a couple of funny photos from people all over the world. At about eleven I get into bed, about two hours have passed since I installed this app and I’ve maybe seen about one hundred “flings” and all sorts of things, and I’m slowly starting to get a little freaked out about this app. It makes for great time wasting when you can’t sleep at 2am but my phone was going off all night and when I woke up at 6am to go to the bathroom I didn’t know what to do to make my phone stop lighting up every few minutes when a new notification came in. Of course, I could’ve just disabled notifications but nobody wants to do that at 6am. So I let it run.

I get up, get ready for work and get to the office, and whilst my computer’s starting up I decide to catch up on Fling. IMPOSSIBLE. This Fling thing has gone way out of hand, I must have had about one hundred new photos, videos and texts and about three hundred more by the time I get home after being busy out all day. So I start to look through them and I get this feeling of disgust in my stomach. Like when I see Beliebers or Abrahamers (the fans of the Spanish version of the Biebs, ten thousand times worse, both the guy and the fans). Just twenty-four hours after installing the app and I’m already on the brink of tears because everybody on it is so cringey. From the guys texting things like “reply if u a girl” to a crazy amount of thirteen year old girls posing and “Texas Guy” and his “guns”. For someone who loves to see how people communicate on the Internet I wish I had never found out that people communicate like this. I’ve only seen three cool things in the hundreds of Flings I must have seen, and those were: Three or four people watching Friends, some guy named Colin from Gibraltar, located somewhere in the South District (by the looks of it, from the photo) and the little map that shows you where what you send has gone. Curiosity got the best of me - and it still is - I can’t wait to get rid of it but it’s like now I need to know what the chances are that sending a message out to thousands of users and getting someone from Gibraltar; and more importantly who this Colin person is and what he thinks of Fling (holla at a brother, Colin). As for what I think about this app, I think the developers knew how rubbish people would get on there, it’s no coincidence that it’s extremely easy to accidentally report people instead of delete their photos.

I’m just going to go ahead and delete this thing. Don’t try it people, it’ll end up making you feel sad, violent and a little ridiculous all at once.