Snapchat, or the Change in Our Perception of Permanence
Ever since I was in high school, we were always told not to publish any possibly bad photo of ourselves. “Your employers will see this! You will never be able to get a job!” (durr hburr technology is bad fire is scary and Thomas Edison was a witch). Apparently, posting a photo of ourself drunk was as bad as getting a face tattoo that would say something like “Unemployable”.
However, parties have always been a part of young peoples’ lives, and we always enjoy being able to remember (in some way) what we did on a particular night. Social media now constructs our identity, a first impression before someone even meets us — people can (and do) already decide who we are, quickly.
For someone like myself who just moved halfway across the world from everyone I know, these platforms are the quickest and easiest way to share what I am doing and living with the people I know without having to send each individual person updates. And it also allows me to be able to skip the mundanities and get straight to the specific themes I want to discuss with someone.
In this sense, Snapchat is the facilitator of deeper relationships — weeding out all of the banalities to get straight to the good stuff, the things that matter. It is a symbol of authenticity, much more impulsive than what we could post on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. On there, we can heavily edit what we show to people.
No one is ever going to post a bad selfie, and the rise of Instagram themes where people only post certain types of pictures in a defined color scheme limits our spontaneity. Even if, obviously, people do not usually share their bad moments, the possibilities to filter reality are much smaller, and the instantaneity of it all makes it more representative of the moments we are living and deciding to share on the app. Consumption and creation happen simultaneously.
Further than this, the integration of this kind of social media leads us to think that we are slowly leaning towards a change in the way we consume information.
In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr — Pulitzer Prize-winning american author — was sensing that we were now leaning more towards an uninterrupted flow of information, and transforming our brain into one big repertoire of external sources rather than an actual hard drive for memories. This means that we now have less propulsion for deep thinking.
But Snapchat makes me believe that we are adapting to this flow, and we will find a way to accommodate it into our daily lives without it being a background noise.
Being the youngest one at the company I intern at, I’m already witnessing the change in brain patterns induced by such apps. People are constantly bombarded by stimuli coming from their mobile devices, which leads to a much more compulsive use of them. They feel left out and invisible if they don’t check their notifications.
I have been trying to teach my coworkers how to use Snapchat for the past month, and slowly, without realising it, they are beginning to film every moment of their daily lives — even if for some, the only person who sees those videos is me.
We all want to believe that we are extraordinary individuals, and that our daily lives are worth their own (non-linear) story. It is both a representation of our ego-centric society and our need for validation, but at the same time, bigger stories seen through the eyes of hundreds of people, curated by Snapchat, give me the impression of a more global and empathic history.
As a generation, we millennials are terribly afraid of the permanence of things — even if we are four times as likely to have some sort of tattoo than previous generations. Refrains such as “nothing that has been posted on the internet can ever be erased” have nursed us.
Snapchat is an ephemeral medium, where we can post about anything and we will not be reminded of our state of drunkenness of the night before, and where our employers won’t see things that you only want to share with your family and friends. Being able to choose which things we want to remember and who we want to share them with, having the knowledge of who kept it (via screenshot), and knowing that everything will disappear in 24 hours, lets us be the masters of our identities.
Huge thanks to Carmen, Shaherose and Sarah for helping me with this article and to Max for creating the illustrations :)
