Snapchat. the Danger of the Ephemeral Article By

Snapchat. The danger of the ephemeral

Article by Lorena Fernández Álvarez (Director of Digital Identity Studies at Deusto University), who imparted the course titled 'How do young people create and manage their digital identities?’ at the Basque Youth Observatory on 3, 10 and 17 November, 2015.

We are now beginning to educate the first generation of young people who have been born in the era of social networks and smartphones. That is to say, they have never known a world without them. However, what they have known are a number of applications that they use before going on to others at lightning speed. The same speed with which they abandoned Tuenti, leaving an empty platform. Twitter is still holding on, only just, thanks to celebrities and the use of hashtags on television programmes. Facebook, no matter how hard it tries, is unable to attract that young audience and, therefore, it has gone on a shopping spree to acquire two new fashionable spaces: Instagram, the kingdom of selfies and WhatsApp.

But a new protagonist is now coming on the scene in force: Snapchat. Also known as the ephemeral social network, it is a mobile App that allows users to send pictures or short videos together with messages and make them visible for a short period of time, at which point they disappear. It has established itself as the great example of what is known as temporary social media, which MIT already presented in 2013 as a trend to recover some privacy. One of the features of our digital identity compared with our analogue identity is the persistence of the information. That information that can turn up years later, when you least expect and when Google decides.

What seems to be an advantage and echoes our advice "to be careful what you upload or it will be with you the rest of your life", also has a side-effect: the false sense of security that ephemeral information provides. In fact, this false sense of security is becoming a catalyst for sexting, an increasingly common practice among young people due to group pressure. Among this age group, the influence of their peers is stronger than that of their parents. Therefore, it you combine this with Snapchat, you have a dangerous cocktail. Research has revealed that young people are fully aware of the potential harmful consequences for them of this activity. In fact, they do not do it for sexual reasons, but rather to become more popular or due to pressure from friends. I always repeat that anything that goes on the Internet is no longer private, regardless of whether we include an end date, because all it takes is to print the screen or take a photograph of a mobile device while it is displaying certain messages.

But, what is Snapchat? What does it hide? This instant messaging application is based on its user-friendliness and is not much of a mystery. It allows users to take photographs and record videos, add text and images, and then upload them or send them to a limited contact list. The messages will only be available for 24 hours at the most. These videos and photographs are known as Snaps and users can control how long they will be visible (from 1 to 10 seconds) and then they will disappear from the recipient's screen and be deleted from Snapchat's server. Therefore, we have two time limits: the time during which the message will exist and the time we give our contacts to view the message. In fact, we could post messages that will never be seen by anyone.

Another interesting feature is that the images that are sent can only be taken using the application at a given moment and they cannot be taken from our mobile phone's photo gallery. In other words, we cannot take a thousand and one selfies until we have one we like and, therefore, it provides a feeling of spontaneity and freshness (and again, ever more immediacy). This application also offers a video-call option and a section for brands; consequently, it won't be long before we see important developments in this digital field.

Let's see what the future has in store for this new fashionable application. As I always recommend, the best way of overcoming any reticence regarding this App is to give it a try and see what it can do. Only then will we be able to educate based on our experience and not on our fears.

Lorena Fernández (@loretahur).