ORIGINS
By 2011 Facebook already had over 500 million users and Twitter was at the epicentre of key events such as the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East and the worldwide protests led by Occupy Wall Street. It was against this backdrop, in September 2011 that Snapchat, which started out as a somewhat obscure mobile network, launched its photo and messaging app. Facebook reportedly offered them $3 billion in late 2013 and now, having rejected their offer, Snapchat is worth around $16 billion. Even later to the party was the live streaming app Periscope, which didn’t launch until March 2015 once it had been acquired by Twitter for just under $100 million.
PURPOSE
Unlike its permanent counterparts, Snapchat’s photos and videos only last a brief amount of time before they disappear
though you can screenshot ‘snaps’ to save them in picture form). From its earliest days, Snapchat’s main demographic has consisted of ‘millenials’ with 60 per cent of American 13-34-year-old smartphone users claiming to be ‘Snapchatters’. Due to its transitory nature, the obvious use for the app, which now boasts over 100 million daily active users, is surely to share sensitive content. Is Snapchat then just a gift for sexters? Apparently not according to researchers from the University of Washington and Seattle Pacific University who surveyed 127 adult snapchatters in 2014 and found that although 14.2 per cent admitted to having sent sexual content via Snapchat, the primary use was found to be for comedic content with 59.8 per cent of respondents reporting this use most commonly.
The idea for Periscope emerged when co-founder Kayvon Beykpour was due to travel to Istanbul during violent protests in the city. Not content with news reports and other social media updates, Beykpour wondered why he couldn’t see what was happening in real time at the hands of people with smart phones who were actually there on the ground. The app, which announced that it had surpassed 10 million accounts four months after it was launched, was created to ‘discover the world through someone else’s eyes’. Interactions aren’t just limited to text. If you like a Periscope broadcast, you can show your approval with hearts – a virtual way of cheering someone on while they perform.
PROS
Most of our young people will be engaged, at least to some extent, with apps like Snapchat and Periscope so there’s no point us ignoring their existence or enforcing new social media bans on our youth group. Yes, we can highlight the dangers and put helpful safety measures in place but let’s also think of creative ways that we can use these apps in our youth groups and even in a wider context for evangelistic purposes. Let’s face it, Snapchat’s face filters are hilarious. What better way to spread joy and build relationships within the youth group than to stage an amusing photos competition and have a good old chuckle with your young people. Likewise, why not think about what you could live stream from your youth group (after checking out the legalities, necessary parental consent and child protection policies) to get your young people’s friends asking questions about God? Or if that’s too complicated, do some research into some periscope streams you might want to watch together as a group (you can save a stream for up to 24 hours).
Young people - both inside and outside the Church - are likely spending more time on their smartphones than anywhere else so let’s meet them where they’re at, enter their narrative and subvert it to point them to Jesus.
CONS
With the rise of young people becoming victims of revenge porn (as we featured in our June news section), we need to encourage our young people to protect themselves online and on apps such as Snapchat which, though seemingly transitory, have the propensity to live forever, if not on another young person’s phone, then on a Snapchat server somewhere.
Periscope is potentially even more terrifying, given some of the activities that have now been watched on the app: a woman streamed herself drunk-driving, a murderer streamed from a US jail before having his phone confiscated and most disturbingly, in May a 19-year-old French woman live-streamed herself taking her own life.
Suicide is the biggest killer of under 35s in the UK so this 19-year-old is sadly not alone in her plight however somehow the sadness of her situation is exacerbated through the medium of social media.
David Pierce from Wired magazine said, ‘Periscope is consensual voyeurism.’ While true, I think this is an understatement. Yes, there are some gems on Periscope which might be helpful in our youth groups but we also want to protect our young people from firstly seeing disturbing content on Periscope, becoming one of its victims.
You might want to share some helpful websites with your young people or even run a whole session around digital privacy (see April’a Ready-To-Use Discussion).
