Representational Politics of Snapchat

The distinguishing feature of the popular photo-messaging app Snapchat is that messages sent using the app disappear forever after they are opened. The ephemerality of the disappearing messages on Snapchat offers a counterpoint to the tendency of digital media to exist seemingly permanently in cyberspace. But more important than the app’s presentation of a more private and intimate mode of communication, the fleeting nature of the messages speed up people’s interaction with the world. Daniel Lopatin says, “I’m super into the idea that the rapid-fire pace of capitalism is destroying our relationships to objects” (Reynolds 83). It could be argued that Snapchat is a capitalist app and that it is destroying our relationships with other people and with ourselves. However, the way Snapchat engages with capitalism and human relationships is much more complicated than simple destruction, and it requires a more nuanced examination.

The first thing that a user will notice upon downloading Snapchat onto their phone is its icon: a ghost. The emphasis on ghost imagery in the app’s design reinforces the idea that, like a haunting phantom, the message is briefly visible to a select few recipients and then it vanishes. This was especially appealing to the early adopters of the app– horny teenagers. Whether it was actually the case or not, early media reporting on Snapchat branded the app as one used for sending nude photos. From then on, adults condemned the app as juvenile. Choosing not to download the app and claiming that it promotes lewd activities pitted adults against Snapchat. This is a typical reaction to new mediums. In his summation of the history of image, W. J. T. Mitchell makes the claim that “the default position of image theorists and media analysts is that of the idol-smashing prophet.” His justification is that each new medium offers new representations that are “more lifelike and persuasive than ever before” (38). They fear that people will be seduced by the new mediums into believing a false representation. But of course representations are best not looked at in terms of the distinction between real and fake.

We will never know the extent of which Snapchat was actually being used for nudes. Snapchat does not maintain an archive of Snaps that have been opened (It does however save sent Snaps on its servers until they are opened, at which point they are deleted from all involved devices.) But some nudes were certainly sent, as demonstrated by the various blogs that post “leaked” nude snapchats that the recipient took a screenshot of, and by the racy photo of Cheyenne that circulated around my high school. That people sent naked photos of themselves over Snapchat speaks to the fact that users felt their messages would be kept in confidence– a digital message meant only for their lover, without the possibility of it being shared to other people unbeknownst to the sender. The intimate relationships that the app fostered relied on the idea that Snapchat was more secure and more private than other methods of communicating over the Internet.

Snapchat’s reliance on the idea that it offers more privacy than usual Internet communication places it in opposition to the typical model for monetizing digital media under capitalism. Most social media apps carefully monitor and save their users activities. They build up an enormous database of information and metadata, which they can sell to advertisers or use to target advertisements at specific users. They turn the information they save into profit via advertisements. Marc Tuters describes people who buy into this agreement as “privacy pragmatists” (246). They agree to give up their privacy in exchange for the ‘free’ use of services. Snapchat breaks away from this conservative model, yet still manages to give consumers their privacy and their services at no charge.

Tuters looks at Google’s stance on privacy in comparison to privacy in Dave Eggers’ satirical novel The Circle. The protagonist is put on trial “for not ‘sharing’ enough.” As a punishment, she is forced to wear a camera all the time to make her entire life available publicly. This punishment is not so different from the way people voluntarily use Snapchat. Despite the relatively recent addition of a text chat to the app, Snapchat is primarily based around communication via photo sharing. Avid Snapchat users will seem to make their entire day visible on their Story. They are sharing more information about their life with the public than has ever been possible before. Snapchat gives users the ability to share every waking moment of their life with their Friends– even their most intimate moments. Those who post updates the most frequently are often celebrities. Of my Snapchat Friends, the users who dominate the top of my Story feed are the musicians I follow: Twin Cities-based singer Allan Kingdom, popular 2007 MySpace rapper Soulja Boy, and of course Snapchat meme DJ Khaled. Interestingly, in The Circle after the protagonist begins broadcasting her every move, she takes on a celebrity status for her model behavior in sharing. Snapchat seems to similarly reward people who share the most. DJ Khaled was an irrelevant rapper/producer past his prime, until late 2015 when he made his Snap Story public and began posting characteristically idiosyncratic videos of his lavish lifestyle. He experienced a resurgence in popularity as a result of his constant sharing on Snapchat. DJ Khaled is an extreme case, but Snapchat remains a key social media platform for celebrities to grow their fan base.

For some users, Snapchat’s Lens feature crosses the boundary between privacy and panoptic. When a Lens is applied in Snapchat, it superimposes a cheesy computer-generated rendering. This is New Aesthetic, which Bruce Sterling defines as “an eruption of the digital into the physical” (“An Essay on the New Aesthetic”). The new feature seems to more outwardly lend itself to the possibility of being used for spying. The most telling of the New Aesthetic aspects of Lenses is the way that Snapchat draws a low-polygon map onto the subjects face right before it applies the Lens. This face map is essentially a Lens in its own right because Lenses are computer processes made visible to the human consumer. In that sense this Lens, and all Lenses, render the way the computer is ‘thinking’ visible for humans. The face map Lens points out that Snapchat is ‘watching’ us. Rapper B.o.B. actually has a theory that Snapchat is using Lenses to build a facial recognition database. As absurd as the claim seems to be coming from a man who thinks the world is flat, the media attention it received indicates that he may not be alone in his suspicious attitude towards cybernetic networked facial recognition software. Snapchat is one of the first popular media outlets to bring augmented reality to such a widespread audience. This engagement with New Aesthetic is unsettling to some because it is a new medium, so naturally some people will be opposed to it (Mitchell 38). Although they may never abandon their suspicion, in time they will come to realize the benefits that augmented reality offers as another step in the partnership between humans and computers, where they now work as tools for each other (Virilio 64).

The idea of voluntarily sharing information is equally important in the contrasting areas of corporate culture and hacker culture. This tension in deciding what to do with information-based products was articulated in the mid-1980s by Steward Brand, the editor of the counterculture-era magazine Whole Earth Catalog. In describing this famous paradox, he says:

“On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other” (Turner 136).

Snapchat is in a unique position somewhere between these two extremes on this issue. It’s very framework as an app that provides private communication positions it within the realm of hacker culture, because it is disrupting the operations of the established system where software tracks its users (Gere 200). In addition, Snapchat’s genealogical origins can be traced back to the popular 1970s hack known as ‘phreaking.’ Phreaking was a countercultural activity that allowed the hacker to make free calls over the telephone system. The first community where Snapchat thrived used the app in the same subversive manor. Orange County High School provided its’ students with iPads but banned Facebook on its network, so the students turned to Snapchat to meet their messaging needs (Hempel). This too positions Snapchat within hacker culture.

By offering private communication and advocating against corporate data ownership, Snapchat fits into the ‘hacker as hero’ trope. One of the earliest and most influential depictions of this trope occurs in the movie Tron, where Jeff Bridges plays a hip, anti-authoritarian software engineer (Gere 183–184). Snapchat is anti-authoritarian is its opposition to privacy invasion. According to their privacy policy, Snapchat does not retain ownership of any user-generated content except for Snaps that users submit to public Live events. This is contrary to the typical policy of social media where the service provider is granted ownership of all user-generated content. Snapchat’s stance against corporate ownership of information content could be seen as a response to the demonization of big data. Snapchat is saving us from becoming tracked data points.

In 2012, Facebook experimented with a Snapchat-inspired messaging app called Poke. The poor reception of the app shows just how strange Snapchat is within the context of a metadata-hoarding based business model. Facebook brought temporary photo messaging to the masses that didn’t want it. Snapchat has always been most appealing to teenage consumers. Since adults initially took an anti-Snapchat stance, the app stayed out of adult’s pockets and it continues to remain that way. When Facebook, a service used by a much broader range of people, made their own version of Snapchat, the adult consumers immediately put Poke into the same anti-Snapchat rhetoric they had previously established. The photo messaging app was a flop in the context of Facebook’s rigidly authoritarian environment.

Snapchat and Poke offer the idea that these apps revealed a more natural depiction of the subject. Like Snapchat, Poke only allowed its users to send photos of what is happening at the present moment. The users can’t upload photos from their brunch last Thursday or their vacation last year. They can only post snapshots. This is a complete turnaround from the way Facebook is used. The Facebook interface encourages curation. Users select their best photos, maybe do a little doctoring in Photoshop if they’re planning on making it their profile picture, and then upload these carefully chosen moments to their profile. Users are pressured into posting only their best content by the knowledge that it will stay attached to their account permanently. Snapchat and Poke, on the other hand, encourage their users to share any moment. Poke, unlike Snapchat, had no way to edit photos. You couldn’t doodle over them and you couldn’t apply filters. (Henceforth, the collective of ways to edit photos in Snachat comprised of Filters, Lenses, Stickers, and drawings will be referred to simply as “filters.”) Poke sets an extremely low bar for how much effort anyone could put into perfecting their photos by not giving them the tools necessary for post-processing. This, combined with the fact that the messages disappear shortly after they are opened, limits how much curation is possible. Facebook encourage the user to curate themselves, whereas Snapchat and Poke present the idea that users are sharing more authentic versions of themselves.

Even the seemingly neutral depictions of the self come with a bias. People on the receiving end (and possibly on the production end too) of a Poke or an unfiltered Snapchat are generally under the impression that they are viewing “the reflection of a basic reality” (Baudrillard 5). This is what Baudrillard refers to as a ‘first-order simulacra.’ It is a presentation of an image as the truth. However, when filters are applied to a Snap, the image becomes second-order simulacra. In this stage the image is a perversion of the real. The real still seems to be present, but it has been falsified through manipulation. Based on Mitchell’s claim that the initial reaction to new forms of media is adversarial, it could be said that when adults refuse to download Snapchat it reveals their own anxieties towards the possibility of being deceived by this second-order simulacra. Facebook, on the other hand, presents a third-order simulacra. Here users create a profile that pretends to be real. Everybody knows that Facebook is meticulously curated, but in revealing it’s own falsehood it hides the fact that the people whom it claims to represent are not real either. The fourth-order simulation is the person who retakes selfies ad infinitum before sending the right one, revealing to themself that no photo can capture reality because objective reality does not exist. Each photo this person takes conveys a message, and through the curatorial selection of certain selfies and rejection of others they craft a political message. Once it is revealed that we exist as “models of a real without origin or reality,”– the hyperreal– then every message becomes political (Baudrillard 1). With no objective truth, every selfie becomes an opportunity to redefine the self.

The ease of access to hyperreal representations that Snapchat offers can be distressing. There are panoptic undertones in B.o.B.’s theory about a facial recognition database. It implies that Snapchat’s surveillance is putting its users into a prison of sorts. Paul Virilio quotes a prisoner saying, “Television makes being in jail harder. You see all you’re missing out on, everything you can’t have” (65). Snapchat is an extreme incarnation of the television in a jail cell. Prisoners can peak at everything that all of their Friends are doing. It can induce intense FOMO. The difference between the television in the jail cell and Snapchat is that the television shows what is happening outside of the prison, whereas Snapchat puts everyone and everything into the prison. There is no outside because everything is being captured in Snaps. By engaging with Snapchat users are putting themselves into the prison of the hyperreal.

Snapchat increases the speed of subjugation and speeds up the way people interact with the world. The nature of Facebook emphasizes that users should post only their best moments. Poke and Snapchat emphasize that users could post any moment. If curation is a process that filters how much and what type of media users are posting, then the absence of curatorial tools allows users to post more. Having the ability to share any moment quickly becomes the ability to share every moment. Vilém Flussers says, “there is no everyday activity which does not aspire to be photographed,” and now the Snapchat interface makes it possible to photograph everything (20). More photos are being taken, providing more opportunities for people to redefine their own identity. This speeds up the process of subjugation. Taking photographs also produces subjects through a Marxist approach. On this Tiqqun writes “capitalist accumulation can still nevertheless survive on the condition that the production-consumption cycle is accelerated, that is, on the condition that the production process accelerates as much as commodity circulation does” (25). The user interface of the app is imbued with imagery related to speed. There are three(!) available filters that adjust the playback speed of Snaps, two of which speed it up by different amounts. And whenever a Snap is opened there is a ticking countdown to when the Snap will disappear, creating a pervasive sense of urgency. Time becomes a form of capital. The production of Snaps is a form of capitalist production that speeds up the process of reproduction.

Snapchat not only accelerates the speed at which subjectivity is being produced, but also channels the redefined subjects towards a homogenized identity. Through the process of disambiguation Snapchat creates Adorno and Horkheimer-style docile bodies. The filters built into Snapchat turn every photographic input into essentially the same few outputs. No matter who is photographed, if you apply the dog Lens then the firstness of the image is about dogs. Every Snap is filtered down to the same message. Mikhel Proulx explains that disambiguation is “the removal of ambiguity,” where all the varied digital content is funneled into the singular logic of capitalism (9). As a digital computer/phone program, Snapchat is built on logical code. This logic reproduces a singular, capitalist way of thinking. Even though users are under the illusion that they are choosing the filter that they want, Snapchat determines which filters are available to choose from. These filters are often related to Eurocentric holidays and current events, such as the death of Prince or the Fourth of July, or the filters are temporarily purchased by major companies to promote their newest product, like HBO’s new season of Game of Thrones. Snapchat’s filters work within the capitalist system to shape identities and produce subjectivity. Furthermore, Snapchat’s filters are also evidence of the way capitalism is driving users towards a disambiguous self.

Snapchat is a complex and multilayered new media artifact. Its ephemeral nature engages with ideas surrounding privacy and surveillance, speed and capitalism. Snapchat produces representations that reproduce the current political and economic systems and reproduce subjectivity. Snapchat centers privacy, revealing that privacy is no longer possible. Its disappearing messages are an affront to corporate culture’s dependency on gathering endless amounts of information about its users, but hypocritically Snapchat is also possibly the single largest peer-to-peer surveillance operation ever in existence. With so much representational data being generated so rapidly, people’s relationships with the world simultaneously speed up. Cultural consumption becomes hyper-saturated, but all that is being consumed is surface-level hyperreal replications.