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B
Before You Read
Read the title from the article below. What do you think the text is going to be about?
What do you know about new kinds of digital connection and online communication?
C
Read the Article
Temporary Social Media
Messages that quickly self-destruct could enhance the privacy
of online communication and make people feel freer to be
spontaneous.
One essential aspect of privacy is the ability to control how
much we disclose to others. Unfortunately, we’ve lost much of
that control now that every photo, chat, or status update posted
on a social-media site can be stored in the cloud: even though
we intended to share that information with someone, we don’t
necessarily
want it to stay available, out of context, forever. The weight of our digital pasts is
emerging as the central privacy challenge of our time.
But what if people could make their posts vanish automatically — making social media more of an
analogue to everyday conversations that aren’t recorded for posterity? That’s the promise of
services such as
Snapchat
, a mobile-phone app which popularity has increased dramatically during
the past year. Evan Speigel and Bobby Murphy, who met as undergrads at Stanford, came up with
the idea two years ago, around the time New York congressman Anthony Weiner accidentally made
racy photos of himself public on Twitter and was forced to resign.
Snapchat
lets users take photos
or short videos and then decide how long they will be visible to the recipient. After 10 seconds or
less, the images disappear forever.
What makes temporary social media so appealing?
Snapchat’s
founders often remark that they
wanted to give people a way to express themselves through something besides the idealized self-
portraits many feel required to maintain on social-media sites.
Snapchats
might be more exciting to
send and receive than other social-media posts because they are ephemeral, but they are also
arguably a more natural way to communicate. Whereas Facebook and Twitter record and store your
every offhand observation
and casual interaction, interactions in temporary social media can be
something like brief, in-person conversations: you can speak your mind without worrying that what
you say will be part of your digital dossier forever.
Although
Snapchat’s
posture as the anti-Facebook is a large part of its allure, eventually its
founders will have to confront some of the same privacy challenges that have vexed Facebook.
Snapchat
contains an obvious technological vulnerability: images that were meant to vanish can
still be saved if the recipient uses a screen-capture feature to take a picture of the message during
the seconds it appears. (If the recipient does this,
Snapchat
notifies the sender, but by then it’s too
late to stop the image from being preserved and shared.) Moreover, while
Snapchat
promises to
erase photos from its servers, the company’s privacy policy adds that it “cannot guarantee that the
message data will be deleted in every case.” As soon as a racy
Snapchat
picture of a celebrity goes
viral, trust in the company could be eroded.
But regardless of the fate of
Snapchat
in particular, the idea of temporary social media is important
because the ability to be candid and spontaneous — and to be that way with only some people and
not others —
is the essence of friendship, individuality, and creativity. Facebook and Twitter do
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make it possible for their members to wall off posts from the wider world and share them only with
trusted people in certain circles. But since those posts still last forever, this capacity for limited
sharing is technologically insecure. To the degree that temporary social networks increase our sense
of control over the conditions
of our personal exposure, they represent a first step toward a more
nuanced kind of digital connection — one acknowledging that our desire to share can coexist with a
desire for reticence, privacy, and the possibility of a fresh start.
Many brands may be wondering whether or not Snapchat is just one of the latest social media trends
that is bound to pass with time and isn’t worth investing in. However, innovative brands can take
advantage of temporary social media by using it to experiment. Technology Review claims a few
brands have already started offering disappearing coupons and secret announcements on the app,
but there are many opportunities
for personal, one-on-one connections with fans.
For instance, spamming a Facebook page with live updates from a conference networking party rife
with cocktails, words of advice, and perhaps a bit of dancing might lead the average consumer to
tire easily. But, when they can easily scroll through and react to 10-second clips they’ve opted into
watching, their reactions will be more positive. Similarly, temporary
social media leads to an
increased sense of urgency—if you don’t click it now, you may never get the chance to—which
makes potential customers more likely to check out what a brand is posting. Temporary social
media gives off that “in-the-moment” feeling, and no one wants to feel as if they’re missing out.
According to Technology Review, this will “require a delicate balance to ensure that the initiatives
tie back to business goals, while maintaining an authentic vibe.” But, with the low stakes of
uploading a short, disappearing clip to social media that can be reacted to and engaged with nearly
immediately, brands should have an easier time maintaining a credible
yet authentic standing
among their audiences.
Temporary social media is changing the way we communicate by shortening the time it takes to
react to something and giving positive reinforcement to the person who put it out there. While many
people think social media is making users too removed from the people and brands they
communicate with, apps such as Snapchat are working to fill in that distance with good stories and
authentic moments.
(See
more
at:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/513731/temporary-social-media/;
https://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/marketing/
)
