Snapping In
From a white, middle class perspective: it would be impossible to separate the “virtual” and “real” worlds. One can take examples from YouTube, YikYak, Birth Without Fear, Buzzfeed, etc.. The “Internet” (to refer to the larger concept and all specific applications and sites and networks) is as embodied as television, or “real life”.
For the purposes of this blog post, though, I would like to examine how Snapchat functions as an online space that the intersection of the “virtual” and the “real” becomes increasingly blurred.
As Lisa Nakamura quotes Steven Marche in “Glitch Racism: Networks as Actors within Vernacular Internet Theory”, “the Internet has reached peak hate”. Let’s examine, for a moment, the fact that Snapchat decided to include a “Bob Marley” face swapping(ish) filter on April 20th, 2016.
To be honest? The entire incident was an example of blatant racist tendencies. An article by The Washington Post claims that the face-swap celebrity blackface wasn’t exclusive to Snapchat—just more public. Other apps/networks allowed users to do a similar face-swap with President Obama, Beyonce, Nicki Minaj, etc.. A South Korean singer did a faceswap with Kanye—but that was only racist because he said racist things while doing it. Right?
“Errors aren’t alien to the system, they’re part of the system.”
-“Glitch Racism (…)”, Lisa Nakamura
Snapchat is also famous for its ‘live snaps’ of large/’major’ events, such as Country Thunder, the Met Gala, NYC Fashion Week, etc.. There seems to be a bias in the snaps from the events that get included in the live feed. Some might say that’s a dumb thing to focus on. I say that it’s not too hard to see that the rich, the conventionally beautiful, the able-bodied, ‘insert socially acceptable identifier here’ are the ones most featured. How do you get to go to these cool, (semi-) exclusive events if you don’t have the money, the wheelchair access, the right skin color, sex, or gender? Not to mention religion and countless other intersectional identifiers.
Oftentimes, much like in Lori Beth De Hertogh’s reading this Unit, women/people of color and poor people come as an afterthought in the quickly expanding virtual space (it allegedly just passed Twitter in users). As “The internet is sometimes extolled as a space where one can be or become anyone.” (Brophy 139), Snapchat seems to be a network that’s trying to be a space where—with a five second video, or an ill-chosen filter—anyone can do/be anything. Then why, exactly, is it so inaccessible/unrelatable for large swaths of the population?