Banner for Art110 Summer 2015

Snapchat

Our Activity this week is different from all the others. In the other 11 weeks our Activity is to do the week’s Activity. But this week our mission is to create the week’s activity!

Why?

Last semester students really loved the Instagram activity. A number of students told me how they liked Instagram so much better than Facebook. (BTW Facebook owns Instagram. They bought it in 2012 for about US$1 billion. Facebook offered US$3 billion for Snapchat in 2013, but the offer was rejected. Facebook bought WhatsApp for US$19 billion in 2014) But then the students also told me how IG was getting kind of old for some of them and how they liked Snapchat so much better than IG. Finally the students urged me to create a Snapchat Activity.

There’s just 2 problems:

  1. As the old guy in the room, I’ve really only played with SC for about 5 minutes. I think I “get it,” but I don’t really grok it the way I’m sure some of you do.

  2. Part of the appeal of Snapchat is that it’s “Ephemeral Messaging.” With platforms like FB & IG your stuff is not only public, but it’s there pretty much forever. I think the really compelling aspect of SC isn’t that you are or are not guaranteed that your stuff can’t be saved, rather it’s that most content most of the time is very fleeting, ephemeral. The private & ephemeral nature of Snapchat can make it a little harder to create an artwork from. But for sure not impossible. A number of artists have created pieces with ChatRoulette, which is also private & ephemeral. And in the case of our Instagram project, we’re really using IG in a pretty “normal” way, but with just the smallest idea that lets us turn it into a “Class Portrait” app.

Flickr, Instagram & Snapchat

Not everything needs to be public. If you’re casually chatting with a friend, “nothing, what are you doing?” maybe that’s better not shared with the world. Still, whether you’re trying to get a job, advance a cause you believe in, or just celebrate someone or something you think is awesome, the power of the public web is huge. I love platforms like WordPress that make it so easy to share powerful ideas with anyone willing to consider them.

It’s worth comparing Flickr & Flickr Mobile to Instagram. Flickr lets you choose a license for your work (more on that later in the summer, but for now let’s just say that it empowers you to decide how your work can and cannot be used and clearly signal that to anyone interested in your work.) Flickr lets you apply “metadata” to your images. They can be tagged for people, ideas, content, and also be geolocated for where they were taken. Except for its infamous hashtag floods, Instagram doesn’t care about any of these things. This makes images you upload to Flickr much more powerful and versatile. You, and if you choose others, can use them in so many ways that Instagram can’t touch. In my judgement, there’s actually only 1 area where Instagram surpasses Flickr: Coolness factor. Instagram’s coolness factor is off the scale. Flickr’s is pathetic. It does make sense to go for IG’s coolness factor and the fact that all your friends are there. But when we make that choice, we give up a lot.

At least Instagram images are public & saved. With Snapchat, of course, images are not. As already noted, that’s a huge strength. It’s kind of the whole point. But it’s worth appreciating that it’s also a way to not record history. History isn’t only famous assassinations like Julius Caesar, John F. Kennedy, or Charlie Hebdo, history is also I went someplace; I met someone. As we move from a platform like Flickr to Instagram to Snapchat, we do gain something, but we also lose something.

screencap of a snapchat of 3 people in a hot tub

Our Mission

I’m sure some of you are big Snapchat users. And perhaps a few of you, like me, have barely used it. Our mission this week, expert or novice, is not just to try Snapchat, but to think of an Art Activity we could use it for. It doesn’t have to be anything like our Instagram activity, but our IG Activity is a nice example in that we’re able to use that app to create something more than just a stream of images. With our #art110su15 tag we created a group portrait. What can we do with Snapchat that not only plays with it, but says something to ourselves and the wider culture beyond us about Snapchat or Mobile Culture or 21st Century Culture or Contemporary Life?

  1. Let’s play with Snapchat this week. Let’s use it with Art110 classmates. With your own friends. Explore. See what you like. At least with Art110 peeps we should probably specify that we might want to capture snaps and post them, so don’t send to each other anything that you truly want to be private.

  2. Share your thoughts and insights during the week on Slack

  3. In your blog post, write a proposal for a Snapchat art activity for Art110. Somebody’s idea will become our official class activity for next semester!

black-and-white photo of a person taking a selfie

Images:

Creative Commons images from Flickr (because there are no Creative Commons images on Instagram or Snapchat!)

Evan Spiegel, Adam Cahan & Marissa Meyer on stage at Tech Crunch Crunchie Awards, 10 February 2014

Evan Spiegel, co-founder & CEO of Snapchat receiving Tech Crunch Best Mobile App of 2013 award as Adam Cahan, Senior VP of Mobile and Emerging Products for Yahoo, and Marissa Meyer, Yahoo CEO, look on.

snapchat screencap of a headshot of a blonde woman snapchat screencap of a man with short, dark hair snapchat screen cap showing a blank notepad with a green ghost drawn on the snapchat layer and the superimposed caption "wonder what he wants to draw?" 2 women make faces at snapchat

Leave a Reply