How Teenagers used Snapchat to Stay Sane during Lockdown.

A bit about Snapchat

Snapchat was first released in September 2011 and developed by “Snap Inc.” The creators of Snapchat, Evan Speigel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie brown first launched Snapchat as “Picaboo” in July 2011 but then relaunched in September 2011 as Snapchat. All three creators were studying at Stanford when they launched Snapchat. Now Snapchat has 229 Million active users and more than 4 billion snaps are sent each day. 

Dangers of Snapchat?

There are many dangers online. Snapchat has a very controversial feature called Snap maps. Snap map is a feature that shows your location and when you were last active. You can turn this off or change who can see it. When you send a snap to a person they can receive it then replay it if need be. But after that, it is deleted. This is the same for chats. If you were to message someone on the chat you would then have to save that message or else it would be deleted.

Our Hypothesis:

We think Covid19 has changed social networks completely. We think teenagers are going to use Snapchat for entertainment as well as connecting with others. We think Snapchat has helped teens over lockdown by it being a source of entertainment and for something to do. By teens using Snapchat, we think it has helped them stay sane while staying connected with friends as no one could see each other. 

Most Teenagers rely on their phones for entertainment. Keeping it on them at all times. But when we are put into lockdown all of a sudden. What do we do?  

We believe the main way of connecting with friends over lockdown is Snapchat. Snapchat has provided teenagers with a way to connect by Texting, Snapping, Videos, Facetime etc...  

Over Lockdown we all had to get used to online schooling. We think we all struggled with this at first.  Using Snapchat for a class group chats helped us along. We used these class group chats not only to talk to each other but to ask for help with schoolwork.  

Our results

We have gathered information from students to provide us with their experiences using Snapchat. Our survey results have shown that 38 / 82 student usages of Snapchat increased. These results have shown that just under half of the students said that their usage of Snapchat had increased. This shows that Snapchat has helped around half of the teens stay sane. 78 students said that during lockdown the main reason they were using Snapchat was to message friends. This also shows us that most of the teens we surveyed were using Snapchat to connect with friends. However, 7 teens said they were mainly using Snapchat for entertainment. We then further investigated these 7 teens and they told us that they had group chats with all their friends and had skype calls and that's how they stayed connected during the lockdown. Three of the teens said they used Snapchat mainly to connect with family. Skyping them, chatting and sending videos and photos, curing teens boredom over lockdown. Out of the 38 students that said their main usage was for messaging friends, 22 of them said they formed new friendships through Snapchat. 

So overall the main usage for Snapchat during lockdown was to connect with friends. This helped teenager stay sane during lockdown.