7 ms·

Evan of Snapchat talks about “performing for your friends” as a strange “side effect” of Snapchat. But the instinct to perform is native to the Snapchat medium.

• jakoblorz 9y ago
  Even if, technically, you can't do it for the likes on Snapchat, I completely agree with your point.
• token_throwaway 9y ago
  That's a pretty dramatic take. Social media use in general probably declines with age, and although I'm not sure how you'd quantify it, I bet that using social media primarily as a form of social proofing declines even quicker with age. All young people "perform" because their self-awareness is on extra high alert and their personalities are half-baked. This has been true since the dawn of high schools.
  • forgottenpass 9y ago
    That's a pretty dramatic take. It's just "the medium is the message" applied to Snapchat.
  • Buttes 9y ago
    I know middle aged people who do the same thing, their "performances" are appropriate for their age. Pictures of expensive vacations, manicured gardens and so on. Same phenomenon.
• gallerdude 9y ago
  I don’t know, isn’t this the same as all social media? I remember reading something along the lines that playing golf is posted on Facebook twice as much as doing the dishes, yet people spend 5x more time doing the dishes. And if we step back from social media, what about regular pictures? They’re supposed to take candid moments of the real world, but even if we’re having a bad day, we smile and act happy for pictures. I agree that a divide between reality and ideal is happening here, just that it isn’t really new.
  • gmu3 9y ago
    Not only do I think its true of all social media, I think it's less true of Snapchat because the medium has less of a memory. What social media do people think is more candid?
    • JustAnotherPat 9y ago
      there's nothing candid about snapchat. Candid is heartfelt. Not something that disappears in 20 seconds.
      • gmu3 9y ago
        The operative word there was more. I also disagree that something that disappears can't be heartfelt but to each their own.
  • semi-extrinsic 9y ago
    > playing golf is posted on Facebook twice as much as doing the dishes, yet people spend 5x more time doing the dishes By that metric traditional newspapers are much worse - the ratio of stories on golf versus on dishwashing is much greater than 5x.
  • Govannon 9y ago
    >what about regular pictures? They’re supposed to take candid moments of the real world I'm not sure that is an accurate representation of photography as a medium, nor has it ever been.
• 0wl3x 9y ago
  This is a great encapsulation of exactly why I put down snapchat a few years ago. It's rather scary how people can get pulled into this feedback loop and how hard social media users can work to keep of a facade of performance. Thanks for giving a noun to the sentiment I've had for a few years.
• personlurking 9y ago
  > Those concert-goers felt the need to misrepresent their experience of the concert. I felt the same sense of misrepresentation browsing Instagram recently, where the photo no longer represents the experience, but rather it is the experience (if one can call a posed and doctored product an experience). One problem with this is the behavioral reinforcement it creates. If dopamine is released enough times when a certain action is performed, it would seem there's a point where your brain is essentially making you continue to reproduce that action. And these services aren't primarily targeting adults, which is concerning as well.
  • kaycebasques 9y ago
    I think HN is quick to overlook the potential positives of this dynamic, so I'll play devil's advocate here. Maybe the Instagram experience is how people actually want to behave? And it gives them a chance to express that ideal self. In other words, it's like the phone is a magic wand, and when it's pointed at them, it's suddenly socially-acceptable to break out of their shell and act silly. Obviously it's weird that it only happens when the phone is pointed at them. But maybe, over time, this "behavioral reinforcement" will give them the courage to act like that all of the time (if that's how they want to be), rather than only when the phone is out. In other words, the key notion that I challenge is this claim that HN is fit to judge Instagram as a misrepresentation of reality. How can we claim that the moments when the phone is away is more real than the moments when they are out? They both happened, therefore they're both real. And there's this unquestioned assumption that just because people behave a certain way when the phone is away, that's how they truly want to behave, when it may as well be just the opposite.
    • personlurking 9y ago
      I can sort of acquiesce here, due to me being a data point of one applying a theory to a userbase of millions. But since they likely spend more time as one version of themselves - when no camera is pointed at them - and less time as the on-camera version, I'd argue that the latter is less authentic. It's a bit like using alcohol (ie, the camera) as a crutch to give yourself permission to loosen up in social situations. It gets the job done but I'd argue it's not authentic.
• staplers 9y ago
  They are quietly subverting their self while sublimating the value of the crowd. How do I have an identity when I consistently invite other people - often strangers - to affirm my experiences? This realization led me to delete most of my social media accounts. Rejecting constant validation and ever-present social commentary opened my life to the quiet details. It led to a mental growth spurt which elevated my career and relationship with family and friends.
• hmhrex 9y ago
  This is a great way of explaining this. I've been without social media for about 1.5 months now. I've noticed the urge to capture an experience for social a few times, even though I've spoken against it in the past. I'm actually happier without it.
  • tedmiston 9y ago
    This is why I keep a (digital) journal. Preserving a memory there in a few sentences or a quick photo that I just save for myself fulfills the desire for me.
• austincheney 9y ago
  > I went to a concert a few weeks ago. The people beside me would stand still for 10 minutes and then someone would pull out Snapchat. The whole group would turn around, flash a smile and start dancing for the camera. 9 seconds later, they were back to watching the concert. Out of curiosity are you and your friends younger than 25? I don't know of anybody in my age demographic that would behave like that.
  • Kroniker 9y ago
    I'm in that age bracket and go to concerts with people in the age bracket. Never seen this behavior in my life. Not even at a shoegaze show!
    • cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
      I'm surprised that you've never seen this behavior. Just go to the nearest nightclub on the weekends and find a group that's doing a bachelorette party or birthday party or something. I see it ALL the time.
      • sethhochberg 9y ago
        Then, promptly find that one nightclub in your city that forbids photos and video... you hopefully have one, and its probably a better time. :)
        • cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
          I've lived in many major cities around the world (and have done enough partying to confidently say) I haven't seen one nightclub that forbids taking photos. That would be stupid. I've seen a couple of bars where they ban it, but not in nightclubs, especially high end ones. It's too hectic to "ban" something there, and the more exclusive the place is, the more likely the visitors want to instagram their visits, the better marketing it is for the club, therefore they allow it.
          • 9y ago
• smogcutter 9y ago
  See also: places and "experiences" (including major contemporary art) meant to be a background for instagram and snapchat https://www.theringer.com/tech/2017/8/9/16110424/instagram-playground-social-media https://www.theringer.com/tech/2017/8/9/16110424/instagram-p... (don't let the Ringer url fool you, very good article)
• thebaer 9y ago
  > How do I have an identity when I consistently invite other people - often strangers - to affirm my experiences? This sums it up so perfectly. It precisely explains what I've always failed to when people ask, "why didn't you take pictures of that? or share them on Facebook?" I was just overseas for several weeks and I was able to fully absorb the entire experience because I wasn't worried about what anyone else in the world thought of what I was experiencing at the moment. I do think there can be a middle-ground with social media if it's designed thoughtfully, with this perspective in mind. I wrote a little about it recently [0], specifically on how Mastodon shouldn't have ported over the favorite/like functionality from Twitter, because functions like that do hijack our brains to use these tools for the subconscious reward, rather than to truly improve our lives in some way. With prevalent awareness of the issue, thoughtful design, and a change in financial incentives for platform makers I think we can come away from this crazy time of intrusive, subconscious-altering social media with just the good parts. [0] https://write.as/matt/mastodon-social-favorites https://write.as/matt/mastodon-social-favorites
  • Buttes 9y ago
    Is it easy for mastodon operators to disable?
    • thebaer 9y ago
      It might be possible in code to hide it on your own instance, but it'll still be there in the various Mastodon clients, other instances, etc. Without knowing the codebase (but having used the software) it looks like it'd be a major core change to turn it off completely, or change it to something like a private bookmark function.
  • tedmiston 9y ago
    The like / +1 is a useful signal though. What if it were visible in the UI but didn't trigger notifications or alerts?
    • noobermin 9y ago
      Hmmm, you can turn off like notifications though. I did that long ago for instagram and facebook.
• tim333 9y ago
  People have smiled for the camera since we've had cameras. It's not really a new social media phenomena.
  • eachro 9y ago
    That is a fair point. Back maybe 20 or 30 years ago, the average person would bring their camera on vacations and that was probably the extent of it. But it's a bit different now that most people carry a camera in their pocket so these moments of "fake" display are much more common.
  • antod 9y ago
    Not in all the really old photos I've seen. Lots of stern serious looks there. Smiles came later.
    • brandonmenc 9y ago
      Hard to smile when you had to sit motionless for an hour while the image burned into the film back then.
      • romwell 9y ago
        That stopped being an issue very quickly. Also, in the beginning it was not unusual that the only portrait of a person was post-mortem - to preserve the memory (as in 100 years of solitude). Difficult to smile in that case. However, photographs were serious business for quite a while. You don't see people smiling on official portraits for the same reason. Imagine that portrait of Napoleon on a horse, but with a smile - doesn't have the same ring to it, does it? Same for early photographs; they were expected to be solemn.
  • jacobolus 9y ago
    This is not true. When cameras are first introduced to most societies, people don't smile for them. Often they even very intentionally stop smiling and adopt a serious/formal expression. Always smiling for the camera is a learned cultural behavior reinforced through pervasive social pressure, which took many decades to form and which was helped along by the heavy use of photography for advertising/propaganda where showing smiles increased sales, not a natural or predestined result.
• coding123 9y ago
  I think this is more a problem of society in general. From my personal perspective everyone I have ever met is faking it 99% of the time. The only time people are real is when they are taking a shit and wiping it up before going back out there. I don't think people want a video of that on social media. Its a question of scale yes, but its the same property.
• wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  This McLuhan quote seems quite relevant and prescient to this thread: >Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere. -Marshall McLuhan, From Cliché to Archetype, 1970
• 8ytecoder 9y ago
  Snapchat is inherently ephemeral - nothing lasts for more than 24 hours. Compare that to instagram/FB where the feed lives forever. The concept of stories does give people some freedom in sharing things a bit more spontaneous. In addition, they don't have a like button or comments. The only "metric" is people who "viewed" your story. The difference was stark when I first used Snapchat. I believe things have changed now. More people have moved to instagram stories and Snapchat is a lot more "filtered" than it used to be. IMHO I think they tried to make people share spontaneously instead of a curated feed. Instagram and FB forced a change.
• sizzle 9y ago
  Thank you for sharing your perspective, it has described what I have been unable to articulate for quite some time now.
• criddell 9y ago
  > Adjusting Snapchat’s interface will do nothing to address the intrinsic ways that Snapchat reorients our relationships around performance. Do you think this is something Snapchat should even care about? How is Snapchat nudging you? Is it more insidious than somebody saying "say cheese!" before snapping a photo?
• kbuchanan 9y ago
  It's human nature to crave feedback. Heck, I avoid social media platforms, but that doesn't mean I don't compulsively check to see what HN readers think of my comments. But it's abnormal to orient your life around likes, and antithetical to a path of happiness. So, yeah, I agree wholeheartedly.
  • iambateman 9y ago
    Honestly, I got a good number of upvotes for OP and came here to see how many upvotes there were. I guess Fake Internet Points are powerful in all forms. ;)
• cam_l 9y ago
  this could also be understood as the inherent shortcomings of photography as a medium to capture your recollection of the experience of an event. or in another way, photography exposes the difficulty of translating your recollection to a third party. when I show you a grainy photo of some bright lights and blurred, sweaty people, I remember a great concert with friends.. but you just see the grainy photo. though I agree with what you are saying, I think this is just the mass adoption of the imagification (both actual and meta) of life that began with portraiture back in the middle ages. why rail against snapchat when we already live in a world of fake family portraits?
• billfeng 9y ago
  I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to be liked by others or wanting affirmation, or even performing for your friends. We are social creatures and we live in groups and communities so of course we want to be liked by others. The problem is where it leads you. There are also loads of artists and creatives who didn't realize how amazing their works are until one day they decided to post it onto the internet and many strangers were amazed by what they made. Their fan base then goes on to encourage and affirm what the artists do and because of that they were able to reach new heights and break limits they never would have been able to on their own. I think the real question is, who are you without this medium? Are you still the same person? The artist who was encouraged by the responses of strangers can continue to do his or her work without the medium. The affirmation has helped them but it's not something they rely on. In contrast if you find yourself craving it so much that without it you are anxious and suffering, then you have a problem. If the concert kids you mentioned were enjoying the concerts anyways, dancing and cheering all the way through on snapchat or not, then it wouldn't be worrying at all. This is really the same for anything that's potentially addictive. Can you live without it? Do you goto lengths that are otherwise uncomfortable to you to acquire it? Yes, snapchat has made it easier for us to fake ourselves, but only in the same way the internet has made it easier for us to look at pornography, and the industrial revolution has made it easier for us to have access to alcohol and cigarettes. I think in time this will pass too, just like all the other harmful things we could indulge in, as people have self-control and are smart enough to eventually realize that being our authentic selves bring about the most happiness.
• ImSkeptical 9y ago
  I disagree on two points. First, people shouldn't love you for who you are. That assumption is in popular culture but it's really pernicious if you examine it. I don't love my mother because she's my mother. I love my mother because she's nice to me, she cares about me, she sacrificed for me, she wants me to do well, etc. If my mother acted like a robot, or worse, was abusive or exploitative, I wouldn't love her. That's true for everyone I do love, and I think it should be true of all love (possible exception for one's own children). If you expect people to love you regardless of what you do or how you act, that's demanding a lot from people for no reason. Second, consider the group of people at the concert. Going to a concert is fun, even if you're just kind of standing around watching. The problem is, when taking a photo, you can't convey visually the fun of being there - so you exaggerate the visual aspect, you look happy, so you can take a picture that represents what you're actually experiencing. I grant that it could be the case that people are cynically trying to create a fantasy life for Snapchat to seem popular or whatever, but my experience with such things is just that you're trying to convey your experience with images. Going to this concert is fun, so look fun so we can snap shot it! Over Thanksgiving I took pictures of my mother, my sister, and my sister's daughter doing the same thing. On the one hand, two of the pictures were staged (I asked two of them to come here and do this so I could take their picture). On the other hand, it captured the similarity that I could see between the three of them. The picture is authentic in the same way that the Snapchat picture is - it had to be created artificially to capture something authentic.
  • tylerhou 9y ago
    > First, people shouldn't love you for who you are. That assumption is in popular culture but it's really pernicious if you examine it. You're making a mostly semantical argument. When you say that "you don't love your mother because she's your mother", you're saying that you don't love your mother strictly based on the fact that she was the woman who bore you (`with respect to her identity`). You then say that you love your mother because she acts `how she acts`. In my experience, when people say they want to be loved for who they are, they mean that they don't want to have to act differently than how they would naturally act in order to be liked or popular. In essence, `who someone is` is commonly interpreted to be a superset of `how someone acts` in union with other sets (like `who someone is with respect to their identity`). Thus most people would understand "be who you are" not only to mean "be who you are strictly `with respect to your identity`" but also "be who you are with respect to `how you act`". You're missing the latter in the definition in of who your mother is. Your second point is valid. In my experience it is difficult to maintain physically a peak level of excitement for a whole event.
• barrkel 9y ago
  I think there isn't as much to "you" as you think there is. What you think of as your identity in any given context is largely determined by previous interactions in that context. The person you are when you're with your parents, vs with your childhood friends, vs college friends, vs old work colleagues - these are all different versions of you, and they're all authentic, despite being different - and yes, they also trigger the performative. It's most obvious when you listen to someone phone home, where people from home have a different accent from where they live. Their accent will start switching back. They'll start reacting to social and conversational cues in remembered ways, rather than current ways. A facet of identity is keyed to its culture. (I think this is why FB is so disturbing; I stopped using it in 2010 or so. It just creates context cross-talk.) I agree with you on the distorting effects of the camera, causing people to exaggerate to communicate a specific story. I don't see it so much as misrepresentation, though. People have sent misleading postcards of holidays to friends and relatives for decades, before photographing everything was feasible, never mind video snippets. It's more about constructing a social object that acts as a kind of structural element for a narrative one wants to write in the shared cultural space of the viewers. And Snap certainly encourages it, probably to excess. On my first significant holiday abroad, I didn't take any photos, because I wanted to stay in the moment, and not be concerned about creating narratives. The experience stays within me as a series of scenes without order, almost like a remembered dream. I could say that it's part of me, my identity. But since I can't share it with anyone, it's impoverished. Shared experiences are bonding in a way that unshared experiences aren't. The shared narrative creates a shared mini-culture, where members belong. Being through a tough spot with someone can be the seed of a deep friendship, and the shared narrative is a big part of why. Whether the narrative is authentic or not isn't actually the point.
• ouid 9y ago
  You say your gripe is with snapchat, but what you've described is the loose amalgamation of everything in the category called web 2.0.
• auganov 9y ago
  Culture is performance. Pondering on the artifice of social relations is timeless. The interesting part is what happens once enough people become aware of it. A total glamour killer. Every day there seems to be so much talk about dangers of social. Would be an interesting strategy for Snapchat to amplify this conversation and position itself as an alternative.