Piwek, L & A Joinson. (2016).

From Digital Culture & Society

---

Current revision

Today’s technologically advanced society incorporates an increasing amount of users that constantly engage with smart devices, enabling a variety of users access to innumerable amounts of information, communication, and entertainment services available anywhere at any time. Social media services provide users to communicate via interface at anytime or anywhere through Information and Communication Technologies (ICT’s) where the design of these sites are crucial for commercial success in terms of attracting and maintaining users. Social media platforms must constantly change their interface design to fit the consumer/user preferences and the ICTs they are available on, for an overall seamless experience. A recent article “What do they Snapchat about?” Patterns of use in time-limited instant messaging service, by Lukasz Piwek and Adam Joinson in 2016, discuss the success of Snapchat- a time-limited messaging service- where in which users send time-limited photos/videos to other users as a form of communication. A lack of time for the manifestation in the analysis of Snapchat reflects the current trend and practices of ICTs, creating a challenge in the literature of such social media platforms. Piwek and Joison provides a convincing, well argued, and wide-ranging in its scholarship as an introduction to the literature on Snapchat and time-limited instant messaging services.

Overview of Snapchat The article “What do they Snapchat about?” Patterns of use in time-limited instant messaging service (Piwek and Joinson, 2016) outlines the following aspects of Snapchat:

• One Rise in Snapchat use has been one of the most rapid and unprecedented in the history of instant messaging services and social networking sites
• Two Users grew from 100 million in mid-2012 to over 70 million in early 2014, then nearly 100 million in early 2015 (according to Wall Street Journal)
• Three Worth $19 billion in early 2015 (Wohlsen, 2015)
• Three Snapchat is exclusively a smartphone app (available on Apple iOS and Google Android devices)
• Four Unique IM service due to how long the image/video is that is sent to other users (between 1 and 10 seconds, which has now since changed since the article was written), which then disappears after

the receiver has viewed the image/video.

• Five Users can also embed 32 characters-long text messages, create finger-drawn “doodles” layered on top of the images, and there is video chat.

The literature review and research of Piwek and Joinson opens up and expands upon the current gap in research on time-limited instant messaging services, more specifically on the mobile application Snapchat.

They identify: In the majority of existing IM services listed above, the content that users exchange is stored on both senders' and receivers’… However, a new category of IM has recently risen to prominence e Snapchat (http://www.snapchat.com). What makes Snapchat stand out from other IM services is that the content users share only persists for a limited period of time (p. 358)

Piwek and Joinson therefore analyze the variations and patterns of use of the medium due to its unique communication/interface design, which varies from other social networking platforms due to the technological differences and functions for the design of Snapchat.

• One Privacy and security issues
• Two Social capital issues
• Three Role of facilitating social interactions and networking on digital communication technologies
• Four Content/explicit sharing
• Five Demographics of users

To conduct the study, 2194 first-year students at the University of the West of England (UWE) were requested to fill out an online survey with full anonymity to expand on the existing market research’s focus on the large proportion of Snapchat users in younger age groups. A total of 209 participants agreed to participate in the online survey (139 female and 70 male), only requirement to participate was that the participant must be a Snapchat user. The survey was constructed using the Qualtrics Research Suite (2013) and incorporated open and closed-ended questions. Demographics and the general use of Snapchat and SNS were first questioned, then using Critical Incidence Technique (CIT), which was used in a set of questions to enquire about participants’ memories of the last snap image/video they sent and received due to the lack of access to content created by participants on Snapchat. After obtaining the initial results, Piwek and Joinson examined how participants used Snapchat to build bridging and bonding social capital by contacting the participants in a short 5-minute follow-up survey. 96 participants completed the follow-up section, which included three scales: Snapchat use Intensity, Bridging, and Bonding social capital on Snapchat.

It was observed that the exact nature of Snapchat use remains difficult to the destructive nature of content sent and received via Snapchat with privacy and security issues. The rapid increase in popularity among young users raises questions about users utilization of IM services with time-limited and self-destructing content, and how this compares to other social media and instant messaging sites. “We found that users mainly share ‘selfies’, typically embed text and ‘doodles’ with photos they share, use it mostly at home, and primarily for communication with close friends and family as an ‘easier and funnier’ alternative to other instant messaging services. We also found that high intensity of Snapchat use was more associated with bonding rather than bridging social capital (p. 358). The study highlights how Snapchat has become effortlessly embedded within its users daily communication practices due to its design and use of time-limited image/video sharing.