For the most part, social media is a way to carefully cultivate a social presence where you can edit, filter, and arrange your life exactly how you want to be seen by your followers, who are then able to publicly critique and comment on it. Snapchat, however, reverts away from the current era of social media and pushes authenticity.
Arguably the most important step Snapchat has taken to promote authenticity is to not have any way in which to critique or “like” someone’s picture. One of the biggest concerns I personally see with social media is that it creates an addiction for approval from others. People become desperate for likes and comments on their posts, and often rely on them for their own self worth. This is a dangerous path that social media has taken us down but Snapchat does not contribute to.
Snapchat also limits the ways in which you can edit and alter yourself, and in effect alter people’s perceptions of you. The way I see most people Snapchatting is by taking and sending a quick picture of either their face or whatever activity they are currently doing. Not many people spend too much time changing anything, so usually the picture they’re sending is organic and real. There seems to be some sort of collective agreement that Snaps don’t have to be perfect and Snapchat backs that idea up by not allowing many ways in which to edit, in exception to funny filters and motion effects, something viewers know to be fake and isn’t an actual attempt at altering people’s impressions of you.
Also, unlike most other social media, Snapchat actually promotes organic and face-to-face interactions, something that is relatively scarce in the world of technology. First off, Snaps only last 10 seconds and then they are for the most part gone. You do have the option to screenshot them but only the person who screenshots them can continue to see it, it’s not a way to collectively commemorate a picture. Users can’t collect and preserve these images in the same way that they do on other social media platforms. It’s fleeting in the same sense as a genuine interaction would be and it lasts only as long as your memory. Even Snap stories, where all your friends are allowed to see a certain picture, only lasts up to 24 hours.
The media itself is also seen as more of a tight-knit community of friends and family. Other platforms usually have a much broader range of people who see what you post and depending on your privacy settings, can see your posts without even interacting with you. On Snapchat you can only send snaps and see each other’s snaps if you both add each other, making the experience much more intimate. In my experience, people are more willing to accept anyone on social medias like Facebook, as opposed to Snapchat where you generally keep it more personal.This offers a social media community that is more synonymous with real life and you are able to share moments with people you actually want to share with and no one else.
Lastly, one of Snapchat’s most progressive features is the way they cover different world wide events and news. Not only do they pull from different news sources and organizations to provide short news videos, they also create their own accumulation of user’s snaps and create a community of viewers. This allows a completely new angle for sharing current events. Instead of having to watch a news anchor report or receive mediated information of something that is happening, Snapchat takes a collection of snaps from real people actually involved and allows for them to be shared with everyone. This gives us insight and news from the source, the people. While you could argue that it can’t be recognized at the same level as actual news sources, it is still able to show an authentic side to current events.
Snapchat is not your typical social media platform. Coming from someone who is fairly active on many forms of social media, Snapchat is by far the biggest supporter of authenticity.
Sam Miner can be reached at mine0034@stthomas.edu