COMS 427 | Olivia and Véronique

Its safe to say that social media has completely shaped our generation. I recently went on the trending section on Twitter and found one of the most trending hashtags, which was #IfCellphonesDisappeared. If indeed we didn’t have cell phones, this class most probably wouldn’t exist. The rise of social media and trending subjects have radically changed our established order. Universities are gradually offering unorthodox classes that are inspired by social media trends and pop culture icons such as the Kardashians and Miley Cyrus. Business Insider has come out with an article on 8 college classes that probably never would have been offered a decade ago. Some of these range from “Jay-Z and Kanye West” at the University of Missouri, “The Sociology of Miley Cyrus: Race, Class Gender, and Media” at Skidmore University to “The World of ‘Downton Abbey:’ Revolution, Rebellion and Re-Creation” at Oakland University. The one that perhaps stood out the most to us was the “#SelfieClass

Hey! We’re back for two new blog posts. Constantly being on social media makes us sometimes forget that certain features of applications are totally crossing boundaries of our private life. Let’s address a few of the Snap Map’s privacy issues. Snapchat is a messaging application that was introduced to the public in 2011. On this platform, users communicate through the exchange of pictures or videos that disappear once you have viewed them. Same goes for when users are using the chat option where they send a text and it disappears once the conversation is closed. For group chats, the messages last only for a duration of 24h unless you saved them. So basically, Snapchat is different because messages/pictures or videos disappear once they have been opened. It gives the idea that what you share has a limited life duration which is contrary to all other social media. This false sense of privacy brings user to put their guards down and blindly trust the application. In this blog post