A snap of intimacy: Photo-sharing practices among young people on social media

Abstract

In this paper we investigate photo sharing practices among young people on the ephemeral social media platform Snapchat. What kind of photos are exchanged amongst 12–17 year olds via this app where pictures are elicited after up to 10 seconds? How is the content of the photos perceived by the young people themselves? We employ an Internet-mediated mixed methods approach. The primary empirical material consists of an online survey focusing on photo-elicitation practices on the two platforms Snapchat and Instagram conducted in 2015 and 2016 amongst Danish young people. Our results suggest that Snapchat is a site for intimacy in that pictures of double chins, ugliness and self-exposure are shared. These activities of photo-sharing and photo-communication bind young people in closeness and friendships. In this respect Snapchat differs from, for instance, Instagram where the pictures shared tend to be more polished, neat and perfect. The intimacy shared and maintained on Snapchat does, however, also cover nudes, dickpics and tarnished pictures. In this respect, intimacy entails both the comfort of sharing and the dramas of disruptions.

Does mobile instant messaging facilitate social presence in online communication? A two-stage study of higher education students

“…Tang and Hew International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education (2020) 17:15 Fourth, the capture function of smartphones with digital cameras enables users to send multimodal messages (e.g., photos and videos) easily. This contributes to an improved sense of connection and promotes phatic communication, which is described as messages that establish and maintain social bonds with interlocutors (Kofoed & Larsen, 2016). For example, in the MIM group, a student took a photo of herself sitting on a beach to share her vacation.…”

Friends, lovers, risk and intimacy: risk-taking as a socially meaningful practice

“…Moreover, they are specifi cally intended for friends rather than to be uploaded on Facebook, for instance, where individuals choose to present themselves "from a more beautiful side" (Mariosa, Th e Disapproving Group). In this way, our focus group participants confi rmed Kofoed and Larsen's (2016) comparison of Snapchat and Instagram use among Danish college students, in which Snapchat is said to represent an intimate, non-public context of photo sharing. Beyond platform and audience, trust was another key theme.…”

“…Nevertheless, Reis and Shaver (1988) highlight that the exchange taking place might not necessarily be verbal. Indeed, intimacy is a theme in many current studies on personal and visual communication on social media platforms (Kofoed & Larsen, 2016), not least in works focusing on the phatic nature of communication on social media (Lomborg, 2011;Sørensen, 2012) or on the use of visual communication to establish and maintain an intimate space (Van House, 2009. One likely reason why the literature on self-disclosure and intimacy is not referenced more often is that it belongs to a quite diff erent research paradigm from the primarily qualitative and media-ethnographic approaches that dominate contemporary research into young people's everyday lives with digital media.…”

Traveling imagery

“…Other parts of the literature are more concerned with the technological conditions and their eff ects in relation to digital sharing practices. Th ey analyze how the ephemerality of, for instance, Snapchat communication creates and invites a certain intimacy and trust (Handyside & Ringrose, 2017;Kofoed & Larsen, 2016). Our research approach and interest in this fi eld mainly, but not exclusively, shares the ambitions of this relatively limited part of the research literature that focuses on the entanglement of sociocultural dynamics, and the technological conditions and aff ordances in image-sharing practices.…”