On Snapchat and the Muslim World: How Snapchat Changed Social Media
The internet has made it easier for people across the world to connect with each other. That’s great.
But here’s the rub:
Until now, the internet has simply served an extension cord for social networks.
And that’s it!
Put broadly, the internet has done 2 things to our social lives:
- It has facilitated the finding process for various groups and sub-cultures.
- It has “metrified” (for better or worse) and digitized social structures that already existed.
The former is readily exemplified by websites like reddit, where a simple subreddit search will show you communities for any number of diverse interests, ranging from the relatively garden-variety r/books, r/videogames, and r/languagelearning to the slightly narrower r/bodyweightfitness, r/steampunk, and r/imaginarymaps.
The latter is crystallized in Facebook. One’s Facebook network is basically a formalized reflection of one’s existing social network in the digital realm.
In short: social networking has brought together people who would be friends anyway. While this is certainly a big deal, particularly for historically oppressed groups and activists, it has not challenged how connections are formed in any significant way.
Until Snapchat.
Snapchat has bridged the gaps between people of different cultures and countries more substantially than any other social network in the history of the internet.
It all started with the Ramadan geofilter — or, more aptly, chronofilter.
Nice, isn’t it?
It features the crescent moon, a relatively recent symbol of Islam, tasteful calligraphy that reads (as you may have guessed) “Ramadan,” a minaret typical of Islamic architecture, and some palm trees to imply, perhaps, the Gulf.
This filter, along with handful of variations on it, was made available to all snapchat users across the globe. Diplo, for one, found the filter during a gig and was perplexed:
Things only escalated from there.
We saw a story focusing on Mecca, the sacred city of Islam, on Laylat al-Qadr, the 27th night of Ramadan.
The story focused on Mecca but also included helpful background information on the details of Laylat al-Qadr. Snapchat pulled a nifty bait-and-switch: it presented a city story but then went far out of its way to describe a Muslim holiday and educate its users. You may have thought were going to see Mecca, and you did, but you also learned a bit about Islam. That’s interesting!
This push culminated in the Eid Al-Fitr story. You can view in its entirety here.
The Eid al-Fitr story expanded on the explanatory animations of the Mecca / Laylat al-Qadr story while curating content from a number of different regions at once. In doing so, Snapchat showcased the major regions of the Muslim world, or ummah (أمة), to its users as an integrated whole.
(This is the Ummah.)
This is important for two reasons.
First, it likely (or at least hopefully) disabused many Anglophone Snapchat users of the notion of Islam as a religion of Arabs.
Islam is not, as popular perception in the US would have it, just a religion for dudes in the desert of the Arabian Gulf who wear funny hats. It is also practiced in the bustle of Jakarta (and a number of other mega-cities), the jungles of Aceh, the lush rice fields of Mindanao, and far, far beyond. Indeed, according to an article on the push, “a lot of the celebrations are from Saudi Arabia, Dubai, UAE and surprisingly Indonesia.” This is not to imply that the author did not know that Indonesia was Muslim; it is simply to illustrate that commentators generally agree that Islam is often seen as a religion of the gulf and not Southeast Asia despite the fact that Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim country.
The second, less obvious (to the Anglophone world, at least) significance is that presenting the Ummah as a unified whole is actually a pretty charged notion — but that’s a story for another article.
It turns out that the Anglophone Muslim community on Tumblr (yes, it exists!) drummed up a campaign to request the story. Though the original post, from a user named “alushaheart,” has since been deleted, a number of other Tumblrites shared it, and it has received a total of 851 “notes,” a Tumblr-specific metric that groups “likes” and “shares” together. That’s interesting. Whether the campaign actually led to the story or not is up for debate, but the very fact that there was such a campaign in the first place speaks volumes about the new relationship between Islam and technology.
I could have just as easily written this about Snapchat’s city stories campaign as a whole, which regularly features cities in the “Global South”/ “Developing World”/non-“Western” world. Monterrey, Nairobi, Jakarta, and, most recently, Colombo have all been featured on the Discover page in the past couple of months.
I choose to focus on the Muslim world because 1) Snapchat provided nifty animations and background information on Islam, which it doesn’t do for its city stories and 2) geopolitical tensions mean that Muslims are one of the most “othered” groups in the discursive environment of the contemporary “West.” Indeed, one American senator recently remarked that he was opposed to any word beginning with “Al-.” Little did he know that “al-” in Arabic serves as the definite article and is the Arabic equivalent of the English “the.” Whoopsies! An infinitely more tragic example of this sentiment is the fact that there have been killings of Muslims in the US. This makes Snapchat’s engagement with Islam and the Ummah all the more important.
In the same way that having gay friends is closely correlated with support of marriage equality, anti-Islamic sentiment is much easier to carry when one doesn’t see or interact with Muslims on a daily basis. To use myself as a counterexample: I worked in a primary school outside the Moroccan capital of Rabat on a gap year funded through the Brownstein Gap Year Fellowship before starting in Princeton, and I heard the call of prayer five times a day and celebrated Eid Al-Fitr with Moroccan friends. I’ve felt an affinity and respect for the Ummah ever since.
Now, through Snapchat, the “West” has been given pretty substantive glimpses of the Muslim world and the Muslim faces that populate it. Snapchat showed us “the Muslim Christmas” and demystified what is generally a very foreign (in every sense of the word) holiday to a relatively Christian “West.” This is a big deal. It’s a lot harder to hate a religious group when you’ve actually seen its members up close, and the Snapchat stories are nothing if not “up close.”
Selfies are inherently intimate. As much as we joke about them, it can be deeply and truly special to be given a window into another person’s life from the narrow and grainy aperture of a smartphone’s front-facing camera.
One image in particular stuck with me. You can see it on the left.
In the Eid-Al-Fitr story, we see a young boy from Dubai who looks more than a little bit bored during the actual prayer portion of the festivities. Having been dragged to Christmas mass as youngster in Los Angeles, I found his expression very, very relatable.
Beyond that, I was struck by the closeness of the shot. I could make out every detail on the boy’s face. It felt like I was face to face with him.
More importantly, though, is that selfies let users present themselves to viewers on their own terms. This is big. It’s something you often can’t get by traveling to a country! The recent Ankarra story, for example, featured a segment of people tearing up a house with “traditional” Turkish dance.
This was really, really cool. I’ve seen ethnic dance performed for the benefit of foreign visitors/tourists in a number of places, and it has never failed to make me at least a little bit uncomfortable. The neo-colonial vibes of the performances gave me the distinct impression that the countries in question were forced to package, essentialize, and commodify their pasts for foreign consumption. I am far from alone in thinking this.
The Ankarra story shows us that “culture” and “tradition” are not static, unchanging, essential categories and that they are actively negotiated, imagined, and enjoyed across the world. We also see this negotiation of culture in the Snapchat stories from the Muslim world. We see the ways Islam is re-deployed in the connected age, and, if we really dig into it, we can see that “modernity” is no longer exclusively the province of the West.
All of this we get from Snapchat.
Nice.
Snapchat’s forays into this arena are, of course, far from perfect.
Snapchat is not fostering person-to-person connections in any meaningful way. Snapchat’s users abroad must additionally bear the burden of English. This isn’t a problem specific to Snapchat by any means, but it’s certainly worth note. Finaly, the city stories cannot easily happen anywhere Snapchat is censored — ergo, China and Iran. This means we can kiss goodbye to a Shanghai story, which would be pretty sweet, or a Tehran story, which would certainly be cool given the recent Iran deal.
In short: Snapchat is not single-handedly ushering in a new era of cultural connectivity for the simple reason that you can look at but can’t talk to the people in the city stories.
That said, Snapchat’s engagement with its Muslim users is a start, and a very bold start at that.
No other tech company has connected users from different countries and cultures in a way that even remotely approaches the scope, scale, or boldness of Snapchat’s city campaigns.
It is time for the rest of the tech world to follow Snapchat’s lead.
Two final notes:
Firstly: this article would not have been possible without this Youtube Channel. To whoever runs it: thank you.
Secondly: there was also an Eid Al-Fitr chronotag, which was pretty dope. A close friend of mine put it to very good use:
Nice.
-G
