Week 6 is here, its not long now until we depart from each other for a week as we head into the Easter festive season. Guess who’s back, back, back…back again… Snapchat’s back…tell a friend. Personally I believe that with a technology as new as Snapchat it is hard to use a research essay from 2007 to draw similar connections due to the constant changing technologies that this generation faces. However the idea’s presented are still relatable when talking about modern day Social Media such as Snapchat.
Social media is about content creation from its users above all else. Without users the applications and social media websites would have no purpose… obviously. We create these online figures of ourselves that we find the need to constantly update. With the example of Snapchat who relies 100% on active users to send and receive content we can see the fluid movement of producers. We have seen a shift from the past where the online world was something you visited and received from has now shifted generation of content produced by a community of participants.
Brun’s idea of the unfinished can be directly related to Snapchat as the application is continually under development with evolutionary ideas, updates, features constantly being brought to the table and given to us by the click of a button. ‘The produsage is based on permissive regimes of engagement’ (Brun’s 2007) and we can clearly see this throughout all of Snapchat where people engage with each other through the application which is constantly being updated. An example of this can be Snapchat’s introduction of ‘my story’ a feature that allows users to post their Snapchat Videos/Images to a ‘story’ and there they will stay for 24 hours allowing all of their friends to views these images. The users of this application probably would have never of thought they needed this feature but now that its available it is a common feature used on the application. Snapchat has the power to introduce new interactive components to their application and sit back and watch as the users upload their content.
References
Bruns, Axel (2007) Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation. In Proceedings Creativity & Cognition 6, Washington, DC.
Alec Bennett 