The big takeaway is: Snapchat is onto something, and it’s much bigger than sexting. The service is a reaction to the saturation of social networking and the the dominant interaction modes on Facebook and Twitter. It’s an immune response, nurtured in the tweaky rebelliousness of teenagedom, to the forces of Big Data, behavioral targeting, and the need to record every stupid little thing in the world. Snapchat might be the defining product of our technophilic, technoanxious age.
I’m wondering how many adults fully understand the need to find tools that aren’t transparent to balance those that are. (I know…depends on how you define “transparent.”) But in talking to my own kids, it’s not that they’ve stopped Instagramming or Tweeting to the world (though they have pretty much stopped Facebooking.) It’s just that they like the relative “privacy” of Snapchat. I’m not sure many grown-ups get “levels of privacy.”
As a parent, it’s one tool that I really can’t monitor very well. My kids have never sent me a snap…:0(. We’ve had enough discussions, however, about the sexting-ish behavior stuff (even in the context of Snapchat) to feel as good as we can about their social media use in general. But I can imagine it must stress some folks out to no end…