My Learning Sanctuary: Snapchat and the Rise of Sexting

The process by which I created my Infographic involved a fair amount of planning and formatting but was guided significantly by the natural flow of my creative process. This was exemplified in the creation of my color scheme for the project. The male and female bar graph that I used for one of my first statistics naturally lent itself to a color scheme of red, blue, and white, and by creating this graphic I had already satisfied the limit of a three-color layout. From that point on, I ran with the red, white, and blue theme, and it ended up holding my project together well.

The style I was aiming for in my Inforgraphic was a simple, yet elegant look that led the viewer through the information without overloading them with extra components. This was my reasoning in choosing the fairly simple font that I used throughout my project and the basic tri-color theme that I mentioned earlier. I chose a fairly simple layout and alternated my statistics between sexting and Snapchat itself in order to keep the viewer engaged and remind them of the comprehensiveness of my topic. I also made a conscious effort in my use of soft, basic shapes for the first five graphics and a hard, black and white shape for the snapchat logo at the end to give it finale-like quality and emphasize the prevalence of Snapchat as the #2 app on the App Store.

The element of this project that I found most interesting was what I learned about the fairly tenuous connection between Snapchat and sexting. When I chose my topic, I was under the impression that Snapchat was used for sexting more than it actually is. Although I do not personally use the app for sexting, I felt like whenever I heard adults talking about Snapchat, it was always in that context. This exposure led me to the notion that Snapchat sexting must be much more prevalent in the rest of the world than it was in my personal experience and gave rise to the question that I based my topic.

Although the statistics I cited reflect that sexting is an important issue and its connection to Snapchat is significant, the relatively small number of messages that were actually of a sexually explicit nature on an app that is fairly universally condemned as a device for sexting was surprising to me. I chose statistics for my Infographic that proved my original point about the dangers and commonality of sexting, but throughout my research an opposing, yet equally convincing argument about the relative insignificance of sexting did emerge to me.