Weight vs. Lightness, Instagram vs. Snapchat

When thinking about the posts about social media, I thought of another, perhaps more trivial, example in our lives of the dichotomy between lightness and weight as conceived of in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Instagram vs. Snapchat. The two social media apps are very popular services based around sharing pictures, but have very different approaches to posting that appeal to a sort of heaviness and lightness for Instagram and Snapchat respectively. Pictures people post on Instagram stay on their profile indefinitely and can be viewed at any time by any of your friends. ON Snapchat, pictures are either posted to be viewed for only 24 hours and then disappear or are sent individually so that they can only be viewed for a few seconds. While the feeling of permanence of Instagram posts, which can be deleted, and the ephemerality of Snapchat stories, which can be screenshotted, are somewhat illusory, the contrast of how these apps works reminded me of the split between Nietzsche's eternal recurrence and Kundera's conception of lightness. The apps can therefore provide a sort of comparison of how people act under these artificially imposed conditions of lightness and heaviness. How this bears out in reality is pretty similar to what we have discussed in class on a more metaphysical level: on Instagram, people generally give their posts much more weight and are more careful about what they do, while on Snapchat, people are more likely to be less serious and might care less about what they post, in a spirit of "Einmal ist keinmal". This is obviously not a super serious example, but I think it provides a sort of interesting experiment of how perceived heaviness or lightness to people's actions can affect their behavior.