Narrative: a spoken or written account of certain events, a story. If we link this idea to Snapchat we see a modern approach to telling/sharing stories. People can share stories and keep diaries online in the form of written blogs, but Snapchat has become a tool that enables people to do this through photos and videos, making it more personal. An insight into someone’s life however real or altered it may be.
Snapchat has become a platform for users to share their stories on. It has shifted the paradigm of storytelling from being mostly verbal to visual. Anyone can now share what they want with their followers. A live journal or diary of the events in someone’s life through videos and photos. Any post made only lasts for 24 hours from the time of posting. Captions can be added to posts to enhance the story-telling aspect, but are optional. It also does enable people to boast, for example if someone goes on holidays in February when everyone else is in college doing assignments, envious feelings are brought about. A major question is ‘why do people need to share every moment with the world?’. Telling stories is one thing, but over-sharing every detail of your day is another.
Famous Vloggers have an avid following on their Snapchat accounts and share their daily routines along with all their extravagant nights out. They are effectively telling a story and focusing on a particular theme such as fashion/sport/fitness/food/health/wellness. An increase in young bloggers has come about in recent years, an urge in young people to share parts of their lives. Is there a hint of self-worth and narcissism about these bloggers? Someone could say ‘who asked these people for their opinions?’. The answer is no one did but these people saw a chance to put themselved out there online and obviously there was a demand for them. Success can be measured by the amount of followers a vlogger has. I myself follow a few Snapchat vloggers but i rarely look at their stories as I find that most of the time it is them simply being bored and just taking silly videos with their friends.
Here is a blog post by another blogger , Jill Walker, who also looked at the narrative of Snapchat and she even included a video: http://jilltxt.net/?p=4432
Digital Ireland 