ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the ephemerality of Snapchat entangles with intimate practices of youth life; that is, how the practices and affects of snapping, sharing and taking screenshots are deeply enmeshed with this particular affordance. It also examines the way in which Snapchat seems to co-form intimacies among teenagers that are both inwardly lived among friends and exposed to a broader public. Nausea occurs in the everyday interpretation of pictures and text. The teenagers explain how they must stop themselves getting cross by deliberately preventing themselves from misreading a snap. L. Berlant's notion of intimacy in relation to Snapchat is captured in the refusal to view the normativities of intimacy as purely good and the acknowledged contradictions of Snapchat's temporal ephemerality and circulation of affects. While Snapchat might be perceived as an ephemeral social media because snaps self-destruct, the affective tenor of the exchanges seems highly persistent.
