When Art Imitates Life: Why Snapchat is the Ideal Social Media Platform
It’s no secret: social media has a bad rep. At best, it’s a means to stay in touch with friends and family and share special moments. At worst, users are seen as vain and inauthentic for sharing a curated, highlights-only reel of their lives. The most devoted of users are chided for interrupting the flow of daily life to archive every moment with an Instagram-worthy picture, whether it’s waiting to eat while our friend takes an aesthetic photo of the meal or inconveniencing strangers to get the perfect shot. At this point, we have internalized the social media gaze. We evaluate each moment through the lens of our virtual audience: Is this graffiti wall a cool enough backdrop for an Instagram selfie? Is this moment funny enough to go viral on Tik Tok?
As someone whose social media presence is limited to Twitter, I was once part of this holier-than-thou crowd who would look down on these users who took to the Internet to flaunt the mundane.
Now, I envy them.
There is something remarkable about the transformation that takes place when we capture an image on camera. We elevate the drudgery of everyday life to a higher aesthetic. We find moments of revelation between the monotony of working, eating, and sleeping. After my influencer friends are done arranging their plate of girl dinner and editing it on VSCO, it is pleasing enough to rival a still life oil painting of a bowl of fruit.
By giving a higher meaning to the ordinary, a mysterious appearance to the ordinary, the dignity of the unacquainted to that of which we are acquainted, the mere appearance of infinity to finite, I romanticize them.
— Novalis, Logological Fragments: #66
Of course, not all social media platforms are created equal. To be sure, among the muddle of Photoshopped influencers peddling laxatives for weight loss and 10-second dance challenges courtesy of Gen Z, only one channel is really worth celebrating.
When Evan Spiegel, the co-founder of Snapchat, launched the app in 2011, he was looking to create a way to share temporary photos. He built Snapchat in response to platforms like Facebook which have an Internet-like memory to remember everything including the “pimple you had on the 38th day of 9th grade.” Spiegel understood that we don’t want to chronicle the pimples. We want to show our friends when we think “(we’re) good at imitating the face of a star-nosed mole, or…show our (our) friend the girl (we) have a crush on.”
To understand Spiegel’s genius, we must first appreciate the Buddhist sentiment that everything in life is temporary. Unfortunately, this includes everything that makes life worth living: beauty, joy, love. Yet, it is this same fleetingness that makes us appreciate the good stuff all the more.
Whether I choose to chronicle my tropical vacation in an Instagram post or a Snapchat video makes a difference. In the former, I am contributing to the neverending barrage of content and noise. Whereas on Snapchat, it is a temporary video that I can share almost in real time and help my friends enjoy the moment with me. I can celebrate that this moment exists only now in the present and will only exist in the memory of my mind henceforth.
In doing so, I am celebrating its beauty while acknowledging its impermanence. This is art.
