How teens communicate on Snapchat

[Rollergirl11]

DD was talking to me today about messaging on Snapchat. Apparently everyone just sends endless random selfies to each other without any chat or conversation. Just the side of someone’s head or a stupid filter. Over and over again. For hours on end. Literally no chat just replying to selfie after selfie with your own selfie. DD gets exasperated with it because it’s utterly pointless and mindnumbingly boring but then she gets slated for ignoring or “airing” people. I can’t think of anything more tedious. It also concerns me that the “Instagram/Snapchat generation” are losing the ability to make conversation. Words are being replaced with pictures. It seems these days that communication is so shallow and superficial and lacks any depth and I really worry about the kind of adults our kids will become, fixated on the perfect selfie.

Do your teens experience similar?

I asked DD who is 15 and she says there are certainly some types who just send pictures like that...she also said that they tend to be the shallow kids...the boring ones with no opinions and little intelligence.

It seems your DD needs new friends? DD and her friends rarely use snapchat but mainly message via Instagram....they send stupid content for sure....weird/funny videos of themselves singing songs or just saying things. They also chat as we're doing now...

Has DD possibly grown out of her mates?

DD does have normal conversations with her close friends on FaceTime and obviously when we are not in lockdown and they can see each other face to face. And she also (perhaps tellingly) has a couple of older friends who are 16 (DD is 14) that she does have normal conversations with on Snapchat and Instagram. But everyone else is just these stupid photos back and forth. Her year group certainly tend to be mainly using Snapchat for messaging these days rather than Instagram.

DD has always been more emotionally mature so perhaps it’s just an age thing that her cohort will grow out of, hopefully soon. But as it stands DD says she’ll wake up in the morning and she’ll have 40 odd new Snapchat messages and she knows that they will all be either streaks or a shot of someone’s jaw! 🤷‍♀️

What do you expect? They are teens! My daughter, Danielle does the same thing... I think its perfectly okay in times like these.

Yep, that's pretty much what they do. My daughters also send mug shots, pics of the ceiling, the floor, a plain black screen etc etc... it's endless and totally pointless!

I'm a teacher, and my students are exactly the same. I don't see the point in it, but then my dad never saw the point in my endless phone calls to my best friends when I was a teenager.

@littlemammas I don’t know really. It just seems so unnecessary, a constant back and forth content of nothing just for the sake of it!

DD gets exasperated. she says she tries to break it up with a bit of small talk but will get one word answers in reply that don’t go anywhere and then it’s back to a shot of someone’s ear so she can’t be bothered to reply to it, or even worse, not even open it and then people say she’s ignoring them.

Just makes me realise how much I’d hate to be a teenager in these times of social media. 😨