Sunday, January 7, 2018

Keep the Streak

Image result for snapchat
        Last night, I forgot to send my nightly "keep the streak" out the people on Snapchat with whom I have streaks (the number of consecutive days you have Snapchatted someone). As a result, I have only two remaining "streaks" left, and for some reason when I noticed they were gone, I felt as sad as if I'd done poorly on a test or broken something valuable. Streaks mean nothing, and yet I have kept them very diligently for years, only forgetting a few times since Snapchat introduced the concept.
        I actually dread keeping my streaks as much as I dislike posting on Instagram, and yet I have done both continually since the seventh grade and know that I would be saddened to an extent if I stopped doing either. I try to be off my phone for a half an hour before I go to sleep, but when I lie in bed and am about to drift off, I often find myself bolting upright and feeling very stressed, as if I'd forgotten to do an important assignment or study for a test, but in reality, I simply forgot to send out the meaningless Snapchat to the ten or fifteen people to whom I've devoted approximately a minute of my day for years. I send out the picture (mainly a blank screen with a filter or a picture of something in my house I've deemed aesthetically pleasing enough) and am relieved, but am fully awake and functioning for at least another twenty minutes. The smart thing to do for both my mental and physical health would be to stop keeping my streaks and focus on more important things, like real assignments or sleep, but something always makes me send out that nightly photo. I suppose I feel like I owe it to the people that have deemed me worthy enough to be one of their "streaks" and I don't want them to feel the same disappointment when the number disappears, or I feel that the number of streaks I keep somehow correlates to the number of friends I have or how up-to-date I am on the newest social media trends.
        I don't even Snapchat half of the people with whom I maintain a streak every night on a regular basis, so the number of consecutive days really means nothing. I should only keep my streaks with those to whom I Snapchat regularly for conversational purposes, but in the end I keep them with whoever wants one. I don't even have streaks with my sisters, and yet I have them with people who I haven't seen in person for weeks. I rationalize this by thinking that they're people with whom I'd like to be friends, which is true, but the reality of the situation is that I feel that the more streaks I have, the more socially savvy I am, like how I know only half of my Instagram followers personally. Some of my friends have around thirty streaks, some of whom they've never actually spoken to, and yet they keep each one as if it's a matter of life and death. I think that having so many is strange and pointless, but feel that I am socially superior if I have more streaks than someone else.
        Streaks seem to be a necessary and important aspect of having social media, but they never would have become that way if people hadn't become so convinced that they were so; streaks are simply a way to ensure Snapchat's relevance as a social media, making us check into their app at least once a day. It's as if they've trapped millions with this one feature; I wouldn't use Snapchat much if it weren't for the streak feature. Snapchat has introduced a variety of ways to keep their users entertained, such as the "Snap Map," where you can track people you follow, or the Discovery page, on which you can read articles or get updates from various media. Conceptually, streaks are pointless and stressful, as it just records the number of days you communicate with someone, and yet I contribute to the madness by obsessively keeping mine every night.

1 comment:

  1. wow I related to this on such a high level. I too dread sending streaks but I still do it anyway. I sorta got annoyed that I have so many streaks with people that I don't talk to anymore but only send streaks to, so I decided that I would just end them after realizing that "streaks" and the amount of them meant absolutely nothing in the end.

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Reflection

        Before writing these weekly blogs based around my media consumption and the effects it has had on me, I went through my life seeing...