Snapchat memory and youth digital sexual cultures: mediated temporality, duration and affect

Abstract

This paper explores how the photo and video-sharing app Snapchat mediates memory and intimacy, using focus group data with 18-year-olds. We use Bergson’s ideas about duration and Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of affect and assemblages to think about how the digital affordances of ‘disappearing’ Snapchat technology reshape memory and intimacy in youth sexual and relationship cultures. Our findings illustrate that Snapchat offers a temporal fastness and ephemerality – but also forms of fixity through the screenshotting of ‘disappearing’ snaps. Because judgement from peers cannot take place publicly within the app, offline discussion of Snapchat activity gains significant traction, making interview accounts of Snapchat use highly relevant. Our analysis of discussions of ‘Snapchat memory’ explores the gendered aspects of performative ‘showing off’ and sexual scrutiny, considering what happens when snaps do not disappear and how Snap exchanges can be used as relationship currency; for instance exploring how some participant’s challenged Snapchat related slut shaming through their uses of humour. Overall we show how Snapchat is mediating youth intimacy, highlighting the reconditioning that occurs between and across the digital world of Snapchat and the physical world of its youth users – evidence of the blurring of online and offline experiences that disrupts digital dualisms.