Snapchat ‘selfies’: The case of disappearing data Jennifer Charteris, Sue Gregory, Yvonne Masters University of New England, Armidale, Australia Little has been written about the impact of ephemeral messaging technologies such as Snapchat, Wickr and iDelete on learner identities. The authors explore how disappearing social media may enable young people to take up a range of discourses and demonstrate discursive agency in ways that support social mobility through shifting relationships with their peers. Much of this unfolds through the transmission of digital images that promote social flexibility. The visibility, of seeing and being seen, demonstrates a Foucauldian ‘gaze’ where power plays out through the capacity to be visible and recognisable to others and specific practices (e.g. selfies) become normalised. Social media technologies furnish emergent spaces for underlife activity that foster this gaze. Taking up the Foucault’s concept of subjectivities as discursively constituted identity categories, the authors explore the relationship between disappearing media and youth identities. Keywords: subjectivities, identities, social media, Foucault, ‘selfies’ Introduction Used to post images from the banal (e.g. breakfast cereal) to the explicit (e.g. ‘selfies’), disappearing data applications like Snapchat, Wickr and iDelete have rapidly become embedded in Australasian teenage (teen) culture. Closely related to other graphic capturing software (Instagram and Tumblr) these media foster and perpetuate teen cultures. Ephemeral messaging with disappearing data enables users to capture and share temporary moments rather than posting more permanent images. There appears to be a proliferation of these disappearing data applications that rely on data self-destruct mechanisms. Information becomes both disposable and short term (Kotfila, 2014). In keeping with the theme of the conference of offering critical perspectives on the use of emerging technologies, we discuss how the prolific use of graphic technologies among teens enables young people to be co-constituted in discourse – to see and be seen. This social activity can be read as relational positioning (Drewery, 2005) where identity categories or subjectivities are socially constituted in discourse. Discourses serve to position and define us as subjects. We work with the notion of discourses because they can illuminate social practices - how people combine and integrate “language, actions, interactions, ways of thinking, believing, valuing, and using various symbols, tools, and objects to enact a particular socially recognizable identity[ies]” (Gee, 2011, p. 201). We draw from Foucault (1977) to analyse how social media technologies provide a vehicle for young people to become recognisable to others as a form of self-surveillance. The capacity to mobilise discourse to take up subjectivities can be read as discursive agency (Butler, 1997). We speculate as to how social media can be used as a vehicle for discursive agency. A preliminary analysis of ephemeral messaging media and their potential impact on youth discourses is provided through a brief account of Snapchat, Wickr and iDelete. An exploration of possible implications for youth cultures then follows. Ephemeral messaging applications and underlife Non-technology-mediated conversation has always had ephemerality in that, as in-the-moment phenomena, it disappears. Furthermore, teens generate their own language codes and slang in order to shift from dominant adult discourse. Social media interactions that are contingent on being resent in a particular time and space enable a ubiquity of image sharing that outstrips the capacity of ‘old school’ conversations as a means to circulate teen culture. There can be the potential for these new forms of in-the-moment interactions to be captured and shared endlessly in time and space. As a new genre of messaging disappearing data applications, that has a point of difference unlike other forms of social media. They afford a flexible self-destruct timer, enabling the sender to determine how long their message can be viewed before being automatically deleted. Positioned by some media companies as an underground technology that inherently evades detection, we are interested in how ephemeral messaging applications can support the youth discourses that flourish in underlife. Gutiérrez, Rymes and Larson (1995) use Goffman’s (1961) notion of ‘underlife’ to describe how young people contest mainstream discursive practices. They define underlife as the range of activities people develop to distance themselves from expected norms. Popular media commentaries (Stern, 2013) on the competition between Facebook and Snapchat present an economic discourse to suggest that the software giants are in competition to ride the wave of youth culture and that teens may shift media loyalties to evade parents. ‘The Economist’ (2014) reported that although there is the perception that young people “post less intimate stuff to