Social media has come a long way since the days of MSN conversations written entirely in acronyms, or the politics of your MySpace Top Friends list.
Social media isn’t just about filters and time-wasting anymore. It’s about art, people.
Snapchat, the photo-sharing app (and, more importantly, the creator of the flower-crown filter), is launching a digital magazine called Real Life. (Sounds like an oxymoron, but that’s the point).
The magazine will feature one written piece a day, in the format of “essays, arguments, and narratives about living with technology.”
The central theme will be the way we use and experience technology in our everyday lives, but without the dense tech-talk favoured by publications like Wired or Gizmag. Think Lenny Letter, through the lens of technology.
The brains behind Real Life is Nathan Jurgenson, a social media theorist and Snapchat employee, who will also serve as the magazine’s editor-in-chief. According the Jurgenson, the line between our ‘real life’ and our ‘online life’ no longer exists; the two serve as extensions of each other.
“I’ve argued that ‘online’ and ‘offline’, like ‘body’ and ‘mind’, aren’t like two positions on a light switch—a perspective I’ve called digital dualism,” he wrote in the first piece published on the Real Life website. “Instead, all social life is made of both information and material; it’s technological and human, virtual and real.”
Hence the site’s title. But there’s more to it than that. The title Real Life isn’t just a dig at our increasingly antisocial tendency to live our lives online, it’s also the title of 1980’s art publication from New York. #trendy
Jurgenson is adamant that all pieces published to the site will be creative or academically-inspired think pieces, “…though we may eventually expand to other mediums and formats as well.”