Whenever I have a few minutes to spare before class, I usually go through and check up on all of my social media applications, the first of which is Snapchat. After seeing “Recent Updates” displayed, I start with the bottom and work my way up (you don’t want to seem too eager for the people who just posted), tapping through all of the stories people have shared within the last 24 hours.
Amongst these stories, we see several repeated plot lines. One is the partygoer. This person has proceeded to post a more than 100-second story that consists of shaky footage of a dark room with blaring music in the background. Accompanied by other people you don’t know, the group of them dance, scream and occasionally take a blurry still shot with drinks in their hands.
Don’t get this confused with another similar story. The concertgoer has decided that you should get the opportunity to view every song from the concert he or she is at, but only in 10-second increments that are accompanied by the sound of one’s own voice.
Next is the selfie story. Somebody was feeling extra cute that day, so instead of posting one picture, he or she posts several from every angle so that you can see all of his or her outfit, hair and facial expressions. Additionally, ever since the new update, every day you get informed about which funny filters there are to choose from, that allow your friends to puke rainbows, look like old grannies or make their faces catch on fire.
We’ve most likely at one point in time been all of those people. Snapchat is, after all, a way that we can document our everyday lives through pictures and text in a way that is less permanent and approval-seeking than Instagram or Twitter. There isn’t a competition for the most likes, nobody needs to favorite or retweet you to make the post seem valid, and it goes away in 24 hours so nobody can hold you accountable for anything that you post. In addition to you, the poster, feeling good about your own post, you get a lot of satisfaction from watching entire collections of other people’s stories.
This satisfaction has given people more affirmation than ever that everything they post is relevant. For example, some followers post a picture of their cars on their stories daily. Slightly above-average cars, nice and everything. After a while, we get the point. If they were to do that on Instagram, eventually their number of likes would go down, but on Snapchat, these people are rewarded every day by the same number of people viewing those stories.
When we post something on our Snapchat stories, we experience this false sense of importance. We know people are going to see this. Where one would think this would cause us to be more hesitant when posting something, it actually makes us feel freer to post whatever we want. For some, this means post after post of the same thing. We sometimes can become concerned more about how to make an event seem like the best ever than actually making it the best ever. This is how we abuse our Snapchat stories—when we are posting without actually considering what others think about it or want to see, but just for the endorphins that get released when we see a high number of views.
If you’ve had the app long enough, you’ve seen how Snapchat has developed into such a prevalent part of our lives. At first, you could only send pictures to your friends that lasted for at most 10 seconds.
Snapchat has changed so much with the creation of the story; it even offers stories from news stations and magazines that can let you follow a major event or let you see snaps specifically from another location. Politicians this year are using Snapchat to reach out to voters and inform them of where they are and what efforts they are taking. Snapchat has progressed to being one of the top social media platforms very quickly; with a net worth of more than $10 billion, it has greatly expanded in attention and usage during the past year.
To go against this progression of Snapchat would be wrong, as we are at the age where we should rightly get to experience these features as they are being debuted. As millennials, we have followed Snapchat from the beginning. We should absolutely make use of the new features that not only Snapchat, but all social media platforms, are putting out there.
But, where is the line? Should we be more preoccupied in recording events for others to see them than actually witnessing them for ourselves? How do we keep people from abusing the Snapchat story? Must we see yet another picture of your car?