It's the sole reason why my phone dies on a daily basis, but I absolutely love Snapchat. Even though Snapchat is a very new form of communication in the modern information society, I felt as if I had to choose it as my term because it has grown so prominent as a form of communication between young adults in the past few years. When looking up the term "Snapchat" in newspaper databases, I found it absolutely hilarious that so many of the first articles about the "new upcoming app" were so negative, criticizing the app for promoting "sexting". I suppose the idea of Snapchat makes it more successful for people to send provocative pictures, but it's entertaining to see how far away from that idea the use of Snapchat has come (well, at least within my circa of friends and connections). The first article I found was in The New York Times from May of 2012. The writer describes Snapchat as an app that helps "people do things that they probably shouldn't on a smartphone". The oldest article in The Chicago Tribune dates from November in 2012 and is titled "Safer sexting is now a Snap...but still a bad idea". This title certainly doesn't hold back the writer's position on the new app and its features.
Today, I feel as if the app is mostly looked as a fun and creative way to communicate with your friends in short with the capability of showing off the fun things you are up to without making a permanent status update on Facebook. Comparing the newspaper databases to the scholarly article databases, the scholarly articles are naturally more informative and much less opinionated than the newspaper articles. The scholarly articles on Project Muse and ProQuest were posted much later than the newspaper articles, dating back in August and December of 2013. They basically both discuss the rapid changes in communication in the last years and the statistics on how much less communication is done through print sources, such as the letter. It's interesting to read all the different opinions on the use of social medias, such as Snapchat. Of course everyone is entitled to their own opinions and thoughts; however, the age of communication through sources such as Snapchat is here and remaining strong, and there's not much that the haters can do about it.
1 comment:
I remember when SnapChat first came out and everyone was thinking it would be used just for "sexting" and things like that. It is really interesting to see how far the app has come. I personally use it as a prime tool of communication (almost another form of texting). Very interesting to see how people can jump to a certain opinion when a new technology comes out.
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