Over the past few months, smiling ghosts have begun popping up around the halls of New Trier, haunting our iPhones and Androids. To some tech-savvy students, these ghosts are the recognizable mascots of Snapchat, a cell phone app that has recently gained popularity among New Trier students.
Stanford student Evan Spiegel created Snapchat last year, and it became one of the most popular iPhone apps by May of this year. The free app’s unique premise has proven to hold huge appeal, especially for high school students.
Like other technology, Snapchat lets users send pictures to their friends. But there’s a twist: recipients can only view images for a set period of time before the pictures disappear forever. Senders can caption their photos and designate how long they will last on the recipient’s phone, between one and ten seconds. If recipients take screen shots of the photos, Snapshot notifies the senders.
Although there are still New Trier students who have never heard of Snapchat, many have already discovered the app as a useful source of entertainment. Junior Megan Neuhaus explained, “I think it’s great because it’s hilarious.” Neuhaus enjoys sending inside jokes to her friends via Snapchat.
Some students are slightly less enthusiastic. “I use it just to send funny pictures to my friends,” said junior Hannah Soifer, who only uses the app occasionally. “It’s nothing great, but something fun to do when I’m bored.”
Snapchat has greater value for students like sophomore Amy Androw, who use it to communicate with friends who live faraway.
Junior Hannah Altman uses it for a variety of communications. “I can keep in touch with people I don’t see everyday. Or people I do. Let’s be honest, yesterday on the shuttle bus I snapchatted with a girl sitting two rows away from me,” she said.
If the use of the word “snapchat” as a verb is any indication, Snapchat is already popular with students.
Nevertheless, students disagree over whether Snapchat will become more commonplace in our iPhones and our social lives as time goes by. Junior Julia Schroeder has known about the app for a while but no longer uses it often. “I think it’s losing popularity, leveling out. The hype’s all gone, everyone knows about it,” she said.
On the other hand, Altman believes Snapchat will continue to expand as long as “they work out a lot of kinks.”
Snapchat’s biggest danger, however, may lie not in a technological flaw but in the nature of the app itself. Critics have worried that users of Snapchat will be more likely to sext when it appears their pictures can’t be easily saved.
Some New Trier students share this fear, including Androw. “I’m worried about Snapchat because the pictures disappear forever, so it’s easier to sext,” she said
While Androw is concerned with the possibility of teens sexting at all, there’s something else to consider. Snapchat cannot stop users from taking screen shots or using other cameras to capture the images they receive, so privacy is never guaranteed. This is true of every image sent, no matter how innocent.
Junior Joel Abraham chooses not to use Snapchat for this very reason. He explained, “I don’t use Snapchat because I feel like when I’m on Snapchat my privacy is jeopardized.”
Some argue that the safety of Snapchat depends on the user’s own judgment. “I think it’s as safe as you want to make it. If you’ve sent a picture that you don’t want to get around, then it’s your own fault,” said Soifer.
Spiegel, the founder of Snapchat, has also argued that Snapchat is no more dangerous for teens than any other technology. According to the New York Magazine, he stated, “It doesn’t actually make sense for sexting. Because you see the photo for what, three seconds?”
In any case, most Snapchat users at New Trier are more focused on the opportunities presented by it than the risks. They seem to agree that Snapchat has filled an important niche in the app market, establishing a new type of communication between young people. As Altman said, “[Snapchat] almost makes a conversation more personal because I can see the person’s face.” For now, at least, it seems that the ghosts of New Trier’s iPhones are here to stay.