Snapchat memory and youth digital sexual cultures: mediated temporality, duration and affect

Abstract

This paper explores how the photo and video-sharing app Snapchat mediates memory and intimacy, using focus group data with 18-year-olds. We use Bergson’s ideas about duration and Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of affect and assemblages to think about how the digital affordances of ‘disappearing’ Snapchat technology reshape memory and intimacy in youth sexual and relationship cultures. Our findings illustrate that Snapchat offers a temporal fastness and ephemerality – but also forms of fixity through the screenshotting of ‘disappearing’ snaps. Because judgement from peers cannot take place publicly within the app, offline discussion of Snapchat activity gains significant traction, making interview accounts of Snapchat use highly relevant. Our analysis of discussions of ‘Snapchat memory’ explores the gendered aspects of performative ‘showing off’ and sexual scrutiny, considering what happens when snaps do not disappear and how Snap exchanges can be used as relationship currency; for instance exploring how some participant’s challenged Snapchat related slut shaming through their uses of humour. Overall we show how Snapchat is mediating youth intimacy, highlighting the reconditioning that occurs between and across the digital world of Snapchat and the physical world of its youth users – evidence of the blurring of online and offline experiences that disrupts digital dualisms.

Keywords:

• Social media
• youth sexuality
• affect
• memory
• Snapchat
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sarah Handyside is a PhD student in Women and Gender at the University of Warwick, researching the relationship between young people, gender, memory and technology. She has an MA in Gender, Society and Representation from UCL and a BA in English Literature from the University of Manchester, and is interested in interdisciplinary approaches to sociological research.

Jessica Ringrose is professor of Sociology of Gender and Education at the University College London, Institute of Education. Her research explores youth identities, sexualities, sexualization, sexism, sexual violence and mobile technologies. Her current projects are focused on digital feminist activism, particularly teen feminist activists who are challenging rape culture in and around school. Recent books include: Post-Feminist Education?: Girls and the sexual politics of schooling (Routledge, 2013); Deleuze and Research Methodologies (EUP, 2013 co-edited with Rebecca Coleman) and Children, Sexuality, and Sexualisation (Palgrave, 2015 co-edited with Emma Renold and Danielle Egan).

Notes

1. Snapchat Sexters, http://snapchatsexters.com/, accessed 22 July 2015.

2. The legal implications of image exchange and youth sexting in varying international contexts have been reviewed extensively elsewhere (see for instance Hasinoff, 2015; Karaian, 2014). Circulation of sexually explicit and nude images of children under 16 years of age is illegal in the UK. Our focus in this paper is not upon the legal implications of sexually explicit Snapchat images but more upon how Snapchat digital image exchange is reshaping youth sexual cultures more broadly.