Snapchat Was The Diary Of My Adolescence. What Happens When That Diary Gets Locked Behind a Paywall?
By Chloe Baker, Senior Opinions Editor
I’m not afraid to admit that I grew up on social media. I’ve had Instagram and Snapchat since I was 12 years old. I dabbled in Musical.ly, tried my luck at becoming TikTok famous and now, for the most part, the “social media” I use every day is my WhatsApp status. Exciting, I know.
I love Instagram. I have a healthy relationship with it. Contrary to what most people say about social media — that it makes them feel bad about themselves — Instagram actually makes me feel quite empowered. I believe that when we use social media to curate something of a scrapbook, and we don’t get hooked on validation, it becomes a digital memory box, holding pieces and moments of our lives we may otherwise forget about.
But before I had Instagram, I had Snapchat, the mother of all digital memory boxes. The white ghost that held more than just filters and one-time-playable photos. And along with it, the original WhatsApp status — the private story. Snapchat wasn’t just a way to chat with friends and send silly photos. It was a diary, a stage, a portal of memories and, sometimes, a mirror.
Like a crazy ex-girlfriend, I remember tracking people’s Snapscores in middle school. “Did this friend leave me on delivered because they weren’t online, or were they snapping other people and just ignoring me,” I would ask myself. Who left me on open? For how long? Who sent me what? And who viewed my private story? Why didn’t they respond? I invested hours of time into the white ghost. I saved every moment to my Snapchat memories.
The good, the bad and the ugly. Since 2016.
Funny moments in class, endless selfies of my friends and I with tacky filters, short clips from concerts, photos I took on vacation I thought were “aesthetic,” selfies of me crying over homework — or over more substantial things. Photos of a black screen with one line of text, either reading something funny someone said, or an idea I had and wanted to “jot down” (electronically?) so I wouldn’t forget it. Short clips of funny family moments that became my modern day version of home videos, and most recently, a video I took of myself after a fun night out, babbling on about how much I love and am grateful for my life. And who could forget those geotag filters that unlocked with each new city you took a photo in? It wasn’t a vacation without seeing what the geotag filter looked like.
Snapchat carried me through my middle and high school years. My bunk from camp created a group chat where we would send mini videos and pictures in Snapchat’s ten-second limit, updating each other on our day-to-day lives. “Streaks” became the new way to weigh just how valuable a friendship was. The higher the streak, the better friends you were. And who could forget the emojis, which the app used to indicate who your “best friends” were — those whom you interacted and snapped with the most. Snapchat would even share with you if your number one best friend also had you ranked as their number one best friend. What an accomplishment that was.
The dawn of private stories made me feel like a mini-influencer. The ability to curate what felt like my own channel, where I could post pictures or videos of whatever I wanted, and where I could intricately choose whomever could view them, was exhilarating at the time. Being able to watch snippets of other people’s lives that were somehow more “intimate” and real felt like a prize. Being selected to be a viewer on anyone’s private story felt like an invite to a Hollywood movie screening.
But as the years went on, something in me shifted. I began to use Snapchat less and less. I matured. I stopped measuring friendships by streaks and validation. I realized there were much more exciting and worthy parts of life than the newest filters, or who responded to my snap quickest. The dawn of middle school was over. I continued using the app throughout high school and seminary, but with completely different intentions. I used it to snap my long-distance friends from camp, summer programs or Israel who lived far away. I used it as a way to briefly touch base with people. There’s nothing like seeing your friend’s face, even if only for a few seconds, right? I still occasionally captured the funny moments in class and the videos from concerts, and I still snapped the off moments where I had tears in my eyes, hoping that one day soon I would look back on this picture and laugh at whatever I was sad about.
Since entering college, my Snapchat usage has become almost completely nonexistent. My private story is gone. I don’t watch others’ private stories, and I no longer take any photos on the app. I know which friendships of mine are important to me and why, and unlike my middle school self, I no longer seek validation from petty things like the amount of time it takes someone to respond to me.
And yet, one minor thing has prevented me all this time from completely coming to my senses and deleting the app for good. I could do with one less distraction in my life, but the memories feature has kept me grasping onto the white ghost for years, and I don’t know if it is possible to loosen that grip.
That little digital archive has become my lifeline to the past of some years I would love to forget, but of others I would love to relive. Snapchat was the diary of my adolescence, a catalog of moments I never bothered to save anywhere else. Which is why Snapchat’s recent announcement hit differently than I expected.
The app recently revealed plans to start charging users a fee to keep their memories. Suddenly, my photos upon photos stored in the app are at risk of being locked behind a paywall — never to be seen or scrolled through again unless I pay up. The happy moments, the sad ones, the funny ones, and even the filtered ones.
Gone.
It’s the kind of move that should make deleting the app easier. Instead, it’s forced me to confront exactly why I’ve held on for so long.
Snapchat symbolized so much of my youth, I never contemplated having to put a price tag on it. Now at this stage in life, I’ll pay a few dollars a month for a newspaper subscription, and I recently dropped a couple hundred on kitchenware for my new apartment. I’ve even considered buying the latest viral Korean skincare product. But paying money just to hang on a little longer to this app — so I can scroll and reminisce on my youth through the lens of my Snapchat memories — is where I draw the line. What does it mean to put a price on reminiscing? On laughter in classrooms, on silly selfies, on evenings spent with friends? On a life fully lived, but also fully recorded?
I stopped using the app when I realized that life is more valuable when we solely savor the present moment rather than relying on the ability to watch the moment later on. I stopped feeling the need to record and snap every moment. In the age of social media and apps like Snapchat, we have become too reliant on saving things to our memories (or camera rolls) rather than in our memories. We are so used to being able to look at a photo and video an infinite amount of times, that we don’t treat our lives and each moment we live as they should be treated — as precious and invaluable. I refuse to pay money for something you can’t put a price on.
And maybe all these memories don’t live on only in the app at all. They may be physically there, and I can reach for them now at any time I want, but these memories have also been inside of me all along. How is it possible to put a price on memories? And no, I don’t just mean the multiple gigabytes of memory that take up space in our Snapchat apps. I mean how much are we willing to pay for the priceless experiences that make up our lives? The highs, the lows. The parties, the new cities we visit. The time with our loved ones.
All of these moments exist in my mind and in my heart. Not in the white ghost, and certainly not behind a paywall. How could I pay for that?
Snapchat was my archive, my diary, my virtual stage. Now that I face the possibility of my memories no longer being free, and I have made up my mind about not paying a premium, I am hit with a sort of freedom. Maybe I can finally delete the app and get rid of any trace of my baggage from middle school once and for all. It feels liberating to fully embrace that our most important memories shouldn’t always be captured, and that the most important lessons we learn in life do not come masked in a filter.
Since my hiatus from Snapchat (and with a little help from an inevitable part of life called “growing up”), I have realized that savoring the moment is immensely more important than snapping a photo of it. It is vital to look at life and breathe it in rather than capture it digitally. This is part of what growing up is. Coming to terms with the fact that validation is not found in streaks or likes, and that the memories we really value can’t be priced.
Maybe I don’t need to look at my Snapchat memories to remember who I was — maybe I just need to look at who I’ve become.
Photo Credit: Chloe Baker