End Of Days: It Turns Out Your Parents Are Taking Over Snapchat

We are in the midst of an epidemic. Snapchat, the photo and video messaging social platform, is being taken over by our parents.

Around 14 per cent of smartphone users aged 35 and up are using the app according to comScore, Mashable reports. Even more alarmingly, 38 per cent of younger adults aged between 25 and 34, who will one day become parents, are also using the app. This is it. The signs all point to the end of social media as we know it.

We recognise that whatever our parents use automatically becomes uncool. Just take a look at past social media failings. Facebook is currently an empty wasteland, with anyone under the age of 21 knowing to avoid it at all costs in order of being accused of senility. And no wonder, since it is dominated by oldies, with 31.1 per cent of users in the age range of 35-54. Its impending collapse is inevitable.

It’s not hard to see history repeating itself. iPhones are no longer cool because our parents have them. Landline phones went out of style with your parents because your grandparents used them. No doubt that the death of the telegram came about because they too became uncool.

Our situation has become so dire that young people have turned to using Myspace, a site so irrelevant that it asks for you to sign in with your Facebook account first.

This transitioning of younger people to Myspace is just symptomatic of a larger problem. The moment Hillary Clinton used Snapchat to throw shade at Donald Trump, we 18-24 year olds knew it was over. We tried to move on… and yet we didn’t. Or more accurately, we couldn’t. There was nowhere else to go. Finally, the rate at which parents soil social media platforms has been outpaced by the rate at which Silicon Valley is able to pump them out.

This problem will only worsen as time goes on. As each generation gets more technologically savvy, the faster we’ll exhaust the time frame within which social media platforms remain cool.

(Vine lived and then died almost instantaneously, thanks to one girl and her mum.)

What this means is that future children will have no means of communicating with each other in a way that is socially acceptable, and that is a future no human should wish for.

What we are slowly realising is that social media platforms are a finite resource. There are only so many variations on how we can share our selfies or pictures of food before we’ve exhausted all options. At the rate that we consume social media platforms today, there may be none left for our children. This, perhaps more than global warming, is the problem of our generation. We’ve inherited those problems from previous generations. Let’s not make the lack of social media platforms our legacy for our children.

Louie Zhu is one of Student Edge’s student contributors. Learn more about the contributors program.

Photo: Twitter / HillaryClinton.