This past summer I tried to make a point of not being on my phone as much as I am during the school year. And to be honest, it was great. The obvious link to phone usage and happiness made me think about what makes phones so bad for us. I decided, for me, that the distraction my phone offers from more important things is the most obvious downside. I can burn through 4 hours on TikTok no problem. But what I thought about more was how our phones actually let us avoid communication. I thought about Snapchat, the app I use most to communicate, and how annoying it is to talk with people on it. And I think the main reason I find it so annoying is because of “half-swiping.”
What is half-swiping?
When you send a message to someone on Snapchat it says ‘delivered’ next to the recipient’s personal icon. Hopefully, in a couple of minutes, the person receiving will swipe right to read the message, and the word ‘delivered’ will change to the word ‘opened’. This shows the sender that their message has been received and, probably, read. However, the person you sent the chat to can also secretly read the chat without any notification to the sender. They do this by “half-swiping.” To “half-swipe” you slide a chat open partially to see what it says without actually clicking on it, thus hiding the fact that you have opened the message. To the person that sent the message it will still appear as “delivered.” The sender will never know if you saw the message.
Why do people half-swipe?
Almost everybody who has Snapchat uses it to communicate with friends, set up hang-outs, and do other social things. You can do all of this on any other social media app, though, so why Snapchat? Snapchat sets itself apart from other messaging apps through all its forms of monitoring behavior. It tracks and displays how many people someone is snapping through Snapscore; it shows if someone has seen a message through chat icons; it tracks your location and who you’re with; and more. But many people, when sent a message, don’t know how to respond, or simply don’t want to answer. This isn’t a problem on most other applications, as you could leave the message and come back to it later without the sender knowing you had seen it. But Snapchat locks the recipient into a situation where they have to either answer the message or leave the person on “opened.” Being left on “opened” is viewed as a failure on the part of the sender. And if you open the message, it’s basically expected that you’d respond pretty quickly. If you don’t, that’s the ultimate diss. So “half-swiping” is a work-around and a non-committal way to view a message without letting the sender know. You can see a message and wait to let the person know you’ve seen the message whenever you want.
The newer version of Snapchat Premium tracks half-swipes with an emoji, making it harder to hide. See here:
The rise of social media has given way to a lot of good and a lot of bad. One of the bad things is that it can cause insecurity. Everyone knows that seeing people advertise the best parts of their lives on Instagram has made people more insecure about their own lives. There are, however, many more forms of insecurity in social media that are less obvious. One of them is losing the ability to communicate directly. This is a result of “half-swiping” and other subtle rejections that kids deal with. Everyone who has Snapchat, in one way or another, plays into all of the monitoring features. It could be through sending a bunch of snaps to increase their Snapscore. (This shows anyone who views your profile that you’re having lots of conversations.) Or people sometimes turn on their location at certain times to show that they’re doing cool things. It could also be through leaving someone on ‘delivery’ for long periods to show that you’re not eager to talk to that person. In reality, most people immediately “half-swipe” the chat to see what it said and then respond.
All of this monitoring and posturing turns communication on Snapchat into a game of watching your own actions to create a favorable appearance. Snapchat is how most teens stay in touch and build connections with new people. But here’s what I’ve been thinking about: If the app capitalizes on the idea of being ingenuine to make people think you’re cool, what does that say about teens who are really good at manipulating it?
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