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Deray McKesson, an activist and organiser, once wrote that if “Twitter is home [then] Facebook is grandma’s house. Tumblr is the computer lab [and] Instagram is 24/7 prom.”
It’s as apt a distillation of the ‘current social media landscape’ (whatever that is) as any, and it so neatly refines into 137 characters the prevailing moods of the platforms on which we perform our lives. In that same tweet, Deray also described Snapchat as “your best friend’s house,” presumably because the app’s (mostly) unfiltered, largely spontaneous and ephemeral nature meant you could live your most authentic life with (almost) no hangover.
If Instagram is where we put forward the best version of ourselves and our ‘aesthetic’, then Snapchat was the place where we could, for 24 hours, compose a story that was fast and loose as our lives dictated it be. Snapchat is where I want to see you lip-syncing for your life, wrestle a gyros on your way home or face-swap with your Labrador for ten beautiful seconds. It’s not where I want to go to see a highly-curated Pinterest board of your greatest hits, and that all changes today.
Snapchat this morning announced a new feature, Memories, which looks to be to the app what the chronological algorithm change was to Instagram’s timeline. That is, it has defeated the app’s very raison d’être. And I’m inconsolable.
“Memories is a new way to save Snaps and Stories on Snapchat,” reads a blog from the tech company. “It’s a personal collection of your favourite moments that lives below the Camera screen. Just swipe up from the Camera to open Memories!”
Memories essentially allows users to save and upload old images from their Camera Roll to both their story and the app’s new feature, or as they so convincingly phrase it:
“You can use Memories to create new Stories from Snaps you’ve taken, or even combine different Stories into a longer narrative! It’s fun to celebrate an anniversary or birthday by finding a few old Snaps and stringing them together into a new Story :)”
“It’s fun.” Don’t believe them? Watch the abysmal promotional video above, in which the whitest couple alive narrowly escape sharing their explicit sex snaps with their parents and in-laws while you await the roll-out of Memories to select users over the next month.
Snapchat is dead. Long live Snapchat 🙂
Tile and cover image: Snapchat
