With the recent Snapchat update, everyone seems to be buzzing; what do all these new emojis mean and what do they mean for us and our friends? Are you and your best friend each other’s best friend? Are you snapping your crush way more than he/she is snapping you back? Your crush has a fire emoji next to his/her name, so you guys are basically dating, right?
Recently overhead:
Bucknellian 1: “Did you hear Sarah and Jack are on a 27 snap-streak!?”Bucknellian 2: “Yeah, they should really just hook up already.”
Without a doubt, technology has given us the opportunity to gain seemingly endless knowledge on some of the most esoteric subjects, but when does access to information become too much? If we were just questioning this with regards to educational information, it would be easy to say the ever expanding internet has been nothing but helpful. However, the educational sites are not the problem–it’s the social media sites that are making people question how much information is simply too much. You can find pretty much anything on the internet in just a few clicks– unfortunately, this includes those embarrassing videos you posted on your BFF’s Facebook wall back in seventh grade (when you were not the savvy social media guru you are today). Needless to say, since those middle school days, social media and access to random information has improved drastically, but has it all been for the better?
Remember just a few years ago when people were protesting the update to the new Facebook Timeline, and the only real explanation we could give was that we were all used to the old layout and we did not want it to change. Around the same time as this update, Facebook released the BETA for Graph Search, an update that allows you to not only look up someone’s name and find their profile, but automatically search for anything they were ever tagged in.
Unlike updating to the Timeline layout, Facebook users were not given the option of updating to Graph Search or not. Our search bars suddenly changed one day, and if you were tagged, you were visible to the world. In addition to Facebook, Instagram notifies you whenever your BFF or crush posts something or gets tagged in a photo. Snapchat will also tell you every single person that has seen your snap story.
These updates undoubtedly make stalking that random middle-school frenemy, that girl you met at that one party, and past and future love interests easier. We’re just not quite sure whether or not we ever needed to know this much information. Is it fun and exciting to be able to check if our crush has seen our snap story? Absolutely. Are we totally intrigued by the new Snapchat emojis and what they could mean for our snapping habits? Definitely. If we never thought we needed this information in the first place – and we already think this is way more than we ever needed to know – what will future updates bring? The number of people viewing our page everyday? The amount of times someone is viewing our snapstory? The exact longitude and latitude coordinates of where we just took that snap? We guess we’ll just have to wait and see.