Limited Transparency (Jones & Hafner, Ch. 7)

I frequently use email during most days to communicate with work colleagues. Email is a form of media that is somewhat opaque, in the sense that the protocols that are used to send it are open source and simple. It’s unlikely that most people—myself included—have the knowledge or desire to modify the inner workings of email, however. It’s a strange idea to think about. An email is just a blank digital canvas in which you can put pretty much anything and send it to someone else. This makes it seem very transparent, as a very natural way to send a message between people.

Snapchat is an application with a deliberately more limited ability to communicate. It allows its users to send images and video that will last for no more than 10 seconds before disappearing (more or less) permanently. Theoretically, the same functionality exists in email. You can send an image in an email that can be stored in perpetuity. You could send a video that lasts 10 minutes instead of 10 seconds. The appeal of Snapchat is in its opacity. For its users, these constraints are, strangely enough, a sort of freedom. Snapchat not only provides a simple interface to make and send media (which would require more tools, skills, and time before sending the same media in an email), but also gives its users the illusion of transparency with its messages’ time limits and impermanence.

A Snapchat message feels more like a moment in the real world that occurred and then vanished, as opposed to an email, which could be stored and dug back up indefinitely. The possible permanence of email can make life more difficult. A rude remark said out loud might be forgotten, ignored, or laughed off. A rude email could stick around forever, and, fairly or not, taint its sender’s reputation. Snapchat’s transient nature doesn’t necessarily make it a clearer analogue to in-person communication. What happened before the 10 seconds of video? What’s the context of the image? Does the caption actually reflect what was happening when the photo was taken? Snapchat, as its name implies, uses snapshots of life to encourage conversation. These chats aren’t likely to get out of the shallows, and might be falsely substituted for deeper conversations.

I’ve seen people use Snapchat to extend the conversation a bit. The application is designed to limit captions to a certain number of characters. The idea is likely that the image or video should mostly speak for itself. Lately, I’ve seen people use the application’s drawing functionality to complete thoughts that are cut off by the character limits. If a sentence doesn’t fit into the caption box, the last word or few will be scribbled onto the image before being sent. The crude shape and bright colors of the drawn words make them stand out from the rest of the words in the caption. This can give them a striking quality, like a kind of punctuation at the end of the sender’s thought. 

It’s like if a typed sentence ended with the last words not only colored, 

but suddenly in a larger and different font. 

It’s a function that the makers of Snapchat probably didn’t plan for, but which grew out of users modifying around the application’s limits.