Delete This When You’re Done

The rise of Snapchat among the under-twenty-five set, who have spent their formative years with Facebook looming in the background, is wholly unsurprising. Snapchat is a photo- and video-messaging service that deletes images and videos from a recipient’s phone within ten seconds; every shot is ephemeral. Snapchat highlights the power of deletion in resisting the gentle totalitarianism of endless sharing. Deletion pokes holes in these records; it is a destabilizing force that calls into question their authority, particularly as complete documentation of a person’s online identity, which Facebook and Twitter increasingly purport to be. Some say the future of privacy is “lying.” But it’s quite difficult to lie all the time in the face of constant surveillance. If we can no longer keep anything to ourselves, deletion may be privacy.