Andrew Thomas
ENC4416
March 1, 2016
Rhetorical
Analysis of Snapchat
Introduction
In the time since its initial release in September 2011,
Snapchat has quickly become one of the most popular social media applications
on the market. As of 2016, in a given day, there are over 100 million active
users with over 60% of them creating content, and giving videos over 7 billion
views (“3V Advertising”). With so many social platforms available to users,
what are the aspects of Snapchat that have made it so successful? I believe
that the privacy (or illusion thereof) that Snapchat provides is what attracts
users, while the architecture of participation that it establishes is what
retains those users. Also, the inclusion of playbor makes Snapchat successful
monetarily to the point that it received offers of $1 billion and $3 billion
from Facebook (Rusli par. 7). In the book Net
Smart by Howard Rheingold, a writer and teacher who focuses on the impacts
of modern communication mediums, he describes that an architecture of
participation is where, “millions of individual acts of participation add up to
a participatory culture …” in which, “individual behaviors … add up to
collective value …” within a community (Rheingold p.112). The established
participatory culture, “[shifts] the focus from individualized work to
collaborative efforts, from individual learning to collective knowledge, [and]
from passive reception to active creation. (Thompson p. 711)” This
participation directly contributes to Snapchat’s monetary success through
playbor. Astra Taylor describes this cross between ‘play’ and ‘labor’ in her
book The People's Platform: Taking Back
Power and Culture in the Digital Age where she states that, “the more we
comment and share, the more we rate and like, the more economic value is
accumulated by those who control the platforms on which our interactions take
place” (Taylor par. 17). Throughout this analysis, we will explore how an
architecture of participation, establishment of privacy (or illusion thereof),
and utilization of playbor apply to the digital environment that is Snapchat.
Architecture
of Participation
Snapchat is built around an architecture of participation
with nearly every aspect of the application encouraging the user to
participate. Unlike traditional social media platforms where users can
half-heartedly participate by clicking a like button, snapchat contains no comment
sections or like buttons for shared pictures and videos. This encourages users
to actually participate by creating their own pictures and videos in response
to others. Also because Snapchat lacks a “like” feature which is traditionally
viewed as a form of currency in other social media platforms, the currency
exchanged within Snapchat is simply the users’ participation in itself. The
application keeps track of the number of people who view someone’s story (posts
that are public amongst their friends for twenty four hours) but this data is
only viewable by the user to whom that story belongs. Therefore, this view
count cannot be considered as a currency within Snapchat.
An
architecture of participation is also established by many aspects of Snapchat’s
user interface and overall visual design. Starting from outside of the
application with the icon, the bright yellow color stands out significantly.
Amongst the application icons on my phone which are primarily blue, red, or
green, Snapchat is the only one that is yellow. The high energy and happiness
evoked by this color choice as well as its eye-catching nature encourage
participation by the user before they have even entered the application.
According to the paper “The Colors of Emotion” published in the journal American Ethnologist in 1974, the
emotion evoked by a color is not simply due to its hue, but rather its
brightness and saturation (D'Andrade
and Egan p.62). If Snapchat’s logo was a dark, unsaturated yellow,
it would not evoke the same emotions within the user. Once inside, the camera
feature is opened immediately. This differs from most other social media
platforms where users are immediately faced with content and have to navigate
to another area in order to create posts, thus allowing consumption by users
before contribution. Due to the immediacy of access to the camera in Snapchat,
it is essentially doing the opposite by encouraging contribution from the user
before consumption. Consumable material only exists when contributions are made
to the community. Therefore this feature strengthens the architecture of
participation that is present within Snapchat. The very straightforward layout
of the camera allows for ease of use that attracts participation from even the
least tech savvy users. The minimalistic design of the overall application
where all major functions are a single swipe away also encourages participation
by advanced and novice tech users alike. More complex applications can be
daunting to new users and discourage their participation.
Additional
features in Snapchat that contribute to its architecture of participation are
the symbolic use of emojis, the trophy system, and the points system. Snapchat
employs the use of emojis next to friends’ names to signify certain things
about a user’s relationship with that person, or solely about that person’s use
of Snapchat. For example, a gold star signifies that someone has replayed that
user’s snaps in the past twenty four hours, a yellow heart signifies you and
that friend both send a majority of your snaps to one another, a smirking face
signifies that friend sends a majority of their snaps to you but you do not
send many of your snaps to them, a grimacing face signifies you and that friend
both send a majority of your snaps to the same person, and a fire emoji
signifies that you and that friend have both been snapping each other every day
(“Friend Emojis”). Snapchat has created a new literacy by giving new meaning to
these emojis. In order for a person to get the most out of the application,
they need to be literate in the symbolism of these emojis. An illiterate user
would just take these emojis at face value, and would not understand their true
meaning. I believe this system of emojis serves to motivate user participation
as they try to make certain emojis appear by certain friends’ names. For
instance, a user may make an extra effort to snap someone to continue a
snapstreak (fire emoji) or to make sure their relationship with their best
friend is reflected within snapchat (yellow heart emoji). Snapchat also
includes a trophy system where users unlock emojis in a trophy case for
completing specific actions within the application. The identities of the
trophies remain hidden until they are unlocked by the user. This provides the
application with a game-like quality whereby the trophy system acts as a user
incentive for participation as they attempt to win all of the trophies, and
thus uncover their identities. Snapchat also includes a points system which
acts in the same way. Every user has a score which is viewable by other users
and is calculated using a proprietary equation that takes into account snaps
sent and received, stories shared, and other non-disclosed factors (“What’s my
“Score”?”). The points system incentivizes user participation even more than
the trophy system as a user’s score is viewable by everyone. This can spark the
competitive nature of some users as they attempt to outscore their friends by
increasing their levels of participation within the application.
A
final aspect of snapchat that contributes to the architecture of participation
is snapchats received from Team Snapchat. On holidays and other special occasions,
every user receives an animated snap from Team Snapchat. If a user has
notifications turned on for Snapchat as most users do, the reception of this
snap can cause illumination of the user’s screen as well as the vibration of
their device and/or the playing of a ringtone. This can bring the user into the
application at times when they were not even using it, and encourages the user
to participate by sharing what they are doing on that holiday or special occasion.
Illusion
of Privacy
With so many
mediums available to stay in contact with others and share pictures and videos,
what is it about Snapchat that separates it from applications like Facebook,
Twitter, and Instagram? In other words, what is the niche Snapchat fills that
these other mediums do not? I believe Ryan Ganzenmuller, former editor-in-chief
of the Buffalo Law Review at the University at Buffalo best answers this
question in his paper Snap and Destroy:
Preservation Issues for Ephemeral Communications where he states, “In an
Internet age where “delete” no longer means “gone forever,” the desire for
short-lived communications has risen. (Ganzenmuller p.1239)” As privacy
policies around social networks life Facebook become more concerning to users,
they are seeking out less permanent mediums of communication. Snapchat has
taken advantage of these concerns by creating a medium in which user
communications are volatile. Users sending personal snaps can set a viewing
time limit between one and ten seconds, and snap stories are viewable by a
user’s friends for up to 24 hours before disappearing. However, this begs the
question: are these snaps truly disappearing?
In
the current privacy policy on their website, Snapchat states that messages are
deleted from their servers and the recipient’s device once they have been
viewed, but they cannot guarantee a timeframe in which they will be deleted (“Privacy
Policy”). They also state that they keep certain information in backup even
after they have deleted messages from their servers, and messages in temporary
storage on a user’s device may be accessed even after they are deleted as is
true with any digital information (“Privacy Policy”). However, from its launch
in September 2011 up until June 2013, the application description explicitly
stated that snaps “disappear forever” after the time limit set by the user
expired (United States p. 2-3). Also, in the FAQ section of their website from
October 2012 to October 2013, the question, “Is there any way to view an image
after the time has expired?” had the response, “No, snaps disappear after the
timer runs out (United States p. 3).” These claims prompted charges in 2014 from
the United States Federal Trade Commission regarding Snapchat’s promises of the
disappearing of messages in the application. The charges made against Snapchat
were settled and finalized later that same year. The terms of this settlement
included the prohibition of Snapchat misrepresenting their maintenance of
users’ information privacy and security as well as the implementation of a
privacy program in which an independent privacy professional will conduct
monitoring for a period of twenty years (“Snapchat Settles FTC Charges” par. 11).
Although Snapchat may have implemented some changes
following this settlement, the concern of whether or not these snaps actually
disappear is still prevalent. One major issue that still remains is the
presence of third-party applications that circumvent the ephemeral nature of
Snapchat. Snapchat’s API (application programming interface) was uncovered and
leaked by Gibson Security in 2013 allowing programmers to interact with
Snapchat’s servers outside of the official application (“Snapchat Security
Disclosure”). This allowed for the development of the previously mentioned
third-party applications in which a user can view and save snaps without the
sender knowing. This raises concerns because it defeats the ephemeral nature of
Snapchat which separated it from other social communication mediums, and it
requires users to trust not only the security of Snapchat’s servers, but also
the security of the third-party application’s servers. An example of one such
third-party application was SnapSaved.com. This application would automatically
save a user’s received snaps to their servers, allowing the user to access all
of their snaps at any time. In October 2014, hackers got into the servers of
SnapSaved and got away with roughly 40,000 snaps (Isaac par. 9). This
application has since been taken offline, but several others still exist that
take advantage of Snapchat’s exposed API.
Another aspect of Snapchat that aids in generating an
illusion of privacy is their chosen method of encryption. Snapchat uses a hard
coded encryption key, meaning that the encryption key is written in the
application’s code and thus cannot be changed without changing the coding of
the application. Since the encryption key is hard coded, it acts as a universal
key unlocking any and every photo, video, or message sent through Snapchat. To
make matters worse, the encryption key (M02cnQ51Ji97vwT4) can easily be located
within the program files, and it is stored in plaintext (unencrypted text) on
Android devices (Defossez p. 5). According to MITRE, the operator of the
National Cybersecurity Federally Funded Research Development Center under the
sponsorship of the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards
and Technology, the consequence of using a hard coded encryption key is that
malicious users can gain access with almost absolute certainty (“CWE-321”). A
competing ephemeral communication application called Wickr uses multiple layers
of encryption, generating random and unique encryption keys for every message
that is sent between users. This is a model that Snapchat could utilize in
order to transform their application’s privacy from an illusion to a reality.
Playbor
For its first few years of existence after its initial
launch in September 2011, Snapchat was entirely ad-free and included no
revenue-generating features. It was not until October 2014 that Snapchat began
to attempt to capitalize on its large and ever-growing user base (“Advertising
on Snapchat”). Today, Snapchat includes several features that utilize the
concept of playbor. The act of the users “playing” with the features is
essentially “labor” for Snapchat as the users’ actions generate revenue.
One
of these features called Discover is a collection of channels each curated by a
different publisher. These publishers include CNN, ESPN, BuzzFeed, Vice, Comedy
Central, and National Geographic to name a few. Each of these channels posts
new content every 24 hours. Rather than playing ads before content, which
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel believes is, “really annoying because it gets in the
way of the content you want to watch,” Snapchat integrates ads within these
channels’ stories (Tipton par. 4). According to an article on Re/code, a tech
news, review, and analysis site, ads within these Discover channels cost around
$100 per thousand views, which equates to around ten cents per view (Wagner
“Snapchat’s Discover…” par. 2). With a given channel receiving potentially
millions of views a day, this is a tremendous source of revenue.
Another
feature similar to Discover is Live Stories which is a series of channels of
curated content submitted by users from specific locations and events. Live
Stories can cover events such as political debates and rallies, sporting
events, and holiday celebrations as well as locations such as a specific city
or college campus. According to another article from Re/code, ads within Live
Stories cost around two cents per view, and Snapchat’s director of partnerships
Ben Schwerin states that Live Stories have an average audience of 20 million
people every day (Wagner “Snapchat is Making…” par. 4-5).
Snapchat
also includes sponsored content in select filters and lenses. While filters
simply overlay a picture or video, lenses use facial-recognition technology to
add various animated elements to selfies. Select filters and lenses may be
sponsored by movies, television shows, products, or sporting events. According
to an article from Business Insider, sponsored lenses can cost $450,000 on
normal days or $750,000 on holidays (Kosoff par. 3). These high prices exist
because of the overwhelming popularity of this feature amongst users. Without
the existence of user desire to “play” with filters and lenses, there would be
nothing for Snapchat to translate into “labor” and generate revenue from these
features.
Conclusion
Snapchat has quickly become one of the most popular
social applications on the market, and it shows no signs of slowing down.
Although it has faced legal challenges regarding promises of disappearing
messages, its ephemeral nature still makes it a better option for privacy than
Facebook or Instagram. Snapchat attracts users with this illusion of privacy,
and retains those users with the establishment of a strong architecture of
participation. It has also made tremendous strides monetarily through the use
of playbor. It is these three aspects in unison that have contributed to
Snapchat’s overwhelming success.
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