Social media is a relatively new form of communication and social interaction.
Different social media platforms have emerged diffusing the limitations of long distance friendship. One such app was launched with increasing success among adolescents and young adults. Snapchat, according to a blog post done by Gary Vaynerchuk the app currently has over 100 million active users. He suggest that Snapchat has manage to replicate the psychological behavior of disappearing memories, hence allowing for fast and temporary information about friends all over the world. Snapchat has become an excellent way for representation of young people’s lives, with the launch of the feature “my story” all your friends have the ability to follow your daily life through short images or videos posted for 24 hours. This means constant exposure to real time activity. This social communication possibly contributes to the prolonging and persistence of friendship.
Snapchat could be seen as a platform for posting life narrative. It allows users to capture and post instantaneously. The number of images and videos are unlimited and available to all your followers. Although the value of this information can be debated, due to features of editing and manipulation of the video, reality can be altered. The validity of the information then also contributes to the strengths of the relationships you hold on this platform. According to Lisa Thomas and Pam Briggs the use of multiple social media decreases our ability to sense where friends are observing our information. They suggest that many platforms such as Facebook, store data posted by users, which means different “selves”, can be viewed on a person’s feed. However, due to Snapchat’s feature of removing old content there is a constant update of information. Allowing your followers to stay up to date with the self-representation you want to portray. This representation is completely in the user’s hands, which would mean a censor of information the user doesn’t desire to share. This is inevitably present in non-social media friendships as well. This suggest that Snapchat’s way of presenting information may hold higher validity in terms of change through time, allowing for friends of distance to observe a life narrative guaranteed to be up to date in terms of representation.
Information about us as Snapchat users is available to our followers. Since Snapchat also allows for personal messages and photos it could suggest for a more personalized presentation for those considered close friends. Although critics suggest a lack of face-to-face relationship, Alexis Elder discusses the validity of online friendship through Aristotelian definition of friendship. She suggests that a friendship involves communication and sharing of thought and doesn’t require physical presence. Hence the conversations and posting that is available on Snapchat fulfills the need for what Aristotle defines as friendship. In this case the self-representation contributes to an update of our friends current situation and social activity and the personalized communication becomes an extra way to keep value and persistence in a friendship. These components conceivable contribute to a preservation of friendship.
Works cited:
Elder, Alexis. “Excellent Online Friendships: an Aristotelian Defense of Social Media.” Ethics and Information Technology, vol. 16, no. 4, 2014, pp. 287–297., doi:10.1007/s10676-014-9354-5.
Thomas, Lisa, and Pam Briggs. “Assessing the Value of Brief Automated Biographies.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, vol. 20, no. 1, 2015, pp. 37–49., doi:10.1007/s00779-015-0896-2.
Vaynerchuk, Gary. “The Snap Generation: A Guide to Snapchat’s History.” GaryVaynerchuk.com, 29 Jan. 2016, www.garyvaynerchuk.com/the-snap-generation-a-guide-to-snapchats-history/.