Snapchat in teenage years

Teenagers are making extensive use of the online social networking service Snapchat, which revolves around the ephemeral nature of interactions. This may seem to suggest that, with contents and conversations bound to be lost, young people should enjoy greater communicational freedom, as they are emancipated from the habitual permanence of everything they choose to share in digital spaces. This article, based on a qualitative methodology, adds perspective to this assumption by exploring the tension between adolescents’ adherence to this socio-technical device’s atypical and highly codified mode of functioning, and the strategies that adolescents put in place to maintain control over the ephemeral nature of their content. In particular, it shows that although the use of Snapchat implies both the appropriation of various gamification processes borrowed from self-quantification tools, and the acceptance of systematic screening notification, young people also manage to refuse these constraints and to define their own understanding of the tool’s “proper use”.