It’s no secret that social
networking has changed the world and the way it works. It helps you connect to
people all around the world allowing you to share experiences, things and
innovative ideas with people that you know, or even, don’t know. It’s been of
significant use, but in saying that, it has also proven to be quite dangerous.
One in particular – snapchat. It’s one of the most popular messaging apps known
to (particularly) adolescents. From following a pimple popping procedure on a
snapchat story, to just seeing what your friends or favourite celebrity is
getting up to in their daily life, snapchat can keep you literally up to date
with what’s going on in everyone’s lives. It influences us to see people’s
lives as they want us to perceive it, how they want us to perceive their love
life, regular life or who they seem to be as a person, when in reality, their
lives could be the complete opposite of what they portray.
While Snapchat is best known for
communicating with friends and keeping up to date with people’s lives, it has
also become an effective way for advertising. More and more companies are
joining the growing trend of social media and engaging with customers via
Snapchat. “Power is not a ‘thing’, it is ‘relational’.” (Kuttainen, 2017). In
this case, companies owning a Snapchat account is both a seductive and a
manipulative power. It helps companies form a relationship with the customer
and enables them to interact with customers on a more personalised level by showing
them sneak previews of upcoming events or products they may have in store,
enticing their Snapchat viewers and therefore, subliminally influencing them to
purchase their product.
Earlier on I mentioned that
Snapchat can be dangerous, here is why; While you may think you’re sending a
snap of yourself to someone and you think it’s private, you’re wrong. They
exist on the internet for ever. Now the average person assumes privacy, and
this ignorance is the danger, and Snapchats power. This can be frightening when
realised. When snapchat updated their terms and conditions they said they offer
"worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable
license to host, store, use, display, reproduce, modify, adapt, edit, publish, etc"
any content you upload to the app. In short, Snapchat legally owns all the
content you distribute on the app and being big business will use the data,
your data, unscrupulously to make profit. Snapchat is a big business and big
business’ do whatever it takes to make money. This specific kind of relational
power is categorized as ‘instrumental’. It’s “something that is held over you
and used to obtain leverage.” (John Allen, 2003, pg. 3). If that’s not power,
then I don’t know what is.
Ultimately, every social media
site will hold immense power over you for the abovementioned reasons and it’s
up to you if you want to be a part of it or not. In light of the statements
made above, the paramount question for social media users is to weigh their
desire for convenience and connectedness against their need for privacy and big
business servitude.
Allen, J. (2003) Lost Geographies of Power. Australia, Victoria, Melbourne: Blackwell
Publishing.
Kuttainen, V. (2017). BA1002: Our Space: Networks, Narratives and the
Making of Place, week 2 notes [Power Point Slides]. Retrieved from: https://learnjcu.edu.au
Snapchat and its Power. [Image]. (2016).
Retrieved from: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/sites/default/files/post_main_images/snapchat-for-blog.png
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