I received my first penis snapchat the other day. Since then, I have been the recipient of many incriminating pictures that people would not want their future employers, or even the majority of their Facebook friends to see, from racist jokes to ‘saucy underboobs’ to pictures of my friends’ one night stands after they fell asleep.
Snapchat is totally unique in the regard that you can send something to someone and there will absolutely be no record of it (if you set the time limit to below four seconds). This can make conversing more fun- and it lets us indulge in our more narcissistic side, as if we need to with Instagram, Facebook and Twitter at our fingertips; but it also blurs the lines between what is appropriate for someone to see and what is not.
Until Christmas, I was the proud owner of a £10 Alcatel brick phone, feeling smug and superior because I was not shackled permanently to the internet like my fellow friends, who seemed constantly glued to their smartphones, taking self-indulgent ‘selfies’ to send each other and seeing who favourited the retweet of a retweet, of a retweet that they did on Twitter. I was an outsider to this whole micro-social media craze.
It seems like the rules are different in our little virtual realities to how they are in the real world. If someone whipped out their dick and showed me without me asking in real life I would probably be very shocked and feel a bit harassed – I could even report it to the police if I wanted. It seems like a very unlikely thing for someone to do. With Snapchat, this may not be a common practice, at least not for technophobes such as me, but it’s not unheard of and isn’t really frowned upon. The prevailing attitude when I incredulously told my friends was ‘congratulations!’ or the timeless ‘LOL’.
Perhaps this isn’t a bad thing (you can block people on Snapchat if they relentlessly send you saucy pictures when you are watching Mad Men with your mum or playing Articulate with your elderly family members) and it makes us more open with each other- it certainly makes sexting easier and less risky. I will always remember the poor girl at school who trusted the wrong immature 15 year old boy and had herself in a compromising position sent by MMS from nokia to nokia all over the school.
However it does make me wonder about how social media erodes away boundaries. With Tinder and Grindr you can arrange sex with strangers any time at the press of one button and you can guiltlessly send people pictures of your genitals in mere seconds – without this technology we probably would keep it in our pants a bit more. Maybe it was always in our nature to be a bit saucy and these apps just enable our naughtier side to come out. Or maybe once you’ve sent your first tit pic, the buzz goes and you don’t feel like it’s a big deal anymore.
All that I know is that I won’t be sending any saucy snaps until my index finger starts behaving itself and stops accidentally sending my snapchats to my parents. Oops.