Moreover, Snapchat’s promise to delete all messages from its database after they are viewed echoes a key characteristic of primary oral culture: that is, the inability (and in our case, the obligation not) to store knowledge. What makes Snapchat unique, he says, it that it “applies technology that fades visual contents as if they were spoken words fading in the air after utterance. This is the argument advanced by an Israeli scholar, Oren Soffer, in a recent issue of the journal Social Media and Society. So, in some strange way, is Snapchat beginning to assume the qualities of an oral medium? She’s talking.” Another clue is hiding in plain sight in the name of the app: “snap” (the term introduced by Kodak for the act of taking a photograph) plus “chat” (which has connotations of oral conversation). “What they don’t realise is that she isn’t preserving images. “People wonder why their daughter is taking 10,000 photos a day,” he said. One clue can be found in something that Evan Spiegel, the chief executive of Snap, recently said to a reporter. And of course Snapchat’s wild popularity must owe something to the ephemerality of its messages.īut some perceptive observers are beginning to think that there’s more to it than that. Just when we’d got used to the idea that digital technology never forgets – that there’s no way of being sure that the embarrassing photograph you posted to Facebook five years ago will not stay on some server somewhere for ever – here’s a digital service that runs completely counter to that. After they’ve seen it, the image evaporates on both their phone and yours. You take a photograph with your phone, add a filter to distort it in some, er, creative way, and send it to your friends. But all these observations are mere ephemera, which may be appropriate given that the distinctive thing about Snapchat is that that’s what it specialises in: ephemera.
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