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I have always been fascinated with new communicative technologies and considered the exploration of new platforms to be an important aspect of my pedagogical practice. As noted by many literacies scholars (Alvermann; Gee; Kist; Lankshear and Knobel), exploring and studying the online literacy practices of our students is of critical importance in developing a better understanding of the motivating factors and influences popular technologies have on offline literacy practices. However, as Snapchat rapidly grew in popularity, I resisted it.
Snapchat, in brief, is an ephemeral, multimodal, mobile messaging service. There are a few things that make Snapchat particularly unique. First, Snapchat approaches both text and image as being of equal importance. Second, Snapchat can only be accessed via mobile device, and finally, within the application, messages are only viewable for up to ten seconds before they disappear. The implications of these characteristics will be explored in this column. Originally launched in 2012, Snapchat recently surpassed 150 million daily users, ten million more daily users than Twitter, which was launched in 2006 (Frier).
The temporary, ephemeral nature of the exchanges in Snapchat gave me the impression that it was more for individuals interested in lewd exchanges than it was for me. I was not alone in that feeling as the mobile app has drawn a great deal of public concern that it may be used to send suggestive or explicit images by the mostly adolescent and young adult user base. However, current studies suggest that while this type of usage is present, Snapchat is primarily used for relatively innocuous communications (Piwek and Joinson).
After several conversations with current and former students about the social and playful ways they use Snapchat, my resistance was overtaken by curiosity; I began looking into this popularized form of multimodal communication.
Multimodal literacy has been a topic of discussion in NCTE tracking through the historical advances in visual media technologies. These discussions can be traced back in English Journal where both the excitement and concerns of new technologies have been explored. In one example of this, following the advent of the moving picture, Robert W. Neal in 1913 observed that though there was public concern about the social and moral implications of the moving picture, it held potential in the English...