Snap! Snap! People are all about Snapchat right now!

For those of you that gave up on following all the new social media out there, Snapchat is an app that allows you to send instant and ephemeral messages/pics/videos to your friends. It also allows you to post this same content in a “story” that is available for 24h to your “followers”, all of that spiced up with extravagant filters (probably imagined by a staff powered by some incredible stuff).

“Snap”taming

I installed the application about a year ago, just to see. I didn’t really get into it immediately, but I thought it was a fun way to communicate with your friends (I remember some “ugly faces” battles, anthology-worthy face swaps and other embarrasing videos).

I follow a couple accounts : all show bits of life, I discover blogger and celebrity voices on a daily basis – a more lively and natural version of who they are.

Sometimes it’s funny, other times it’s embarassing, I can’t say it’s fascinating but it’s not unpleasant: it’s kind of like a tid-bit of “reality shows”, something that entertains our voyeuristic side. I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a guilty pleasure because I’m not sure I get the whole point of it all (or maybe I just didn’t discover THE account that’ll make me an Addict).

The “story”of my life

But critic is easy for someone who doesn’t post anything on their own “story”! Indeed, even if I noticed that a number of you were starting to follow my Snapchat account, for the time being, I’m not posting anything. Why?

1/ Because I don’t believe my life to be so interesting that it would justify showing it to you in detail (same thing about Instagram, but at least on Instagram you have an esthetical challenge).

2/ Because I enjoy mystery: I’ve sometimes been disappointed when I discovered people in their more intimate (although probably a bit staged) daily life. I get that feeling that most of you are looking for “natural” people, and the “Ah! But she’s actually just like me!” moments, and I understand that state of mind. But for my part, I enjoy it when a little something is left to the imagination, and for it all not to be an open book. And when you think about it, that’s kind of what Snapchat is : an open book.

3/ Because I’m more of a Periscope environment kind of girl. I only tested it once, but I enjoyed the fact that the followers can not only communicate with the person they are following, but also with each other when they’re looking at the video… which is not the case with Snapchat, where the dialog is only between the snapchatter and it’s followers, one on one.

4/ Because I want to live in the present. It may seem paradoxical for someone who will instagram with precision her bowl of udon even though their lunch/dinner date is starving! What I mean by that is that Snapchat is a higher level of intrusion : filming your evening with friends, describing the view you’re watching, capturing brief instants of life at the risk of not enjoying them irl.

Soon…

Although I have mitigated feelings about Snapchat, I can’t assert that it’s not for me. I’m tempted to live the “on-board camera” experience … but only on a very infrequent level.

I can’t tell you when, where and if I’ll do it on a quality level, but I imagine this new tool can be a new way for you to discover, in a more spontaneous way, the backstages of an event, an unsual encounter or a rare find. My Snapchat “induction” will certainly happen at some point, but when? I can’t say. (English translation by Marine)