Hypothetically speaking, we “feel naked” without our iPhones. We go everywhere with them, we protect them, and now we even smile at them and sometimes even kiss them goodnight—or that’s what it looks like.

We’re not really confessing our love to our phones. We’re just taking “selfies”—or in other words pictures that we take of ourselves by ourselves.

Since Apple added the dual camera feature to iPhones, the art of “selfying” has become simple. Switch the perspective of the camera from the outside world to your world and you’re instantly staring at yourself. Click the camera capture button and there you have it—a picture of yourself without the help of another person. What to do with the selfie? The options are endless.

Selfies can be posted on the various social networking sites, they can be given as gifts to your mother, or they can be sent to another person.

Sending selfies has just recently been made even easier with a new application.

Snapchat is an application designed to “share photos with family and friends.” It’s a picture chatting application that allows users to send photos and receive them. Unlike other pictures, users can set a time amount, up to ten seconds, that a user can view the photo. After that allotted time, the photo, in most cases, will eventually be destroyed and can never be viewed again unless the viewer has time to quickly screen shot the photo. If using the screen shot option captures the photo, then the user is immediately notified.

With the safety measures that the application has taken, overall it seems like a safe social network. But then again, how many social networks are completely safe?
Since Snapchat is run off of data plans and Internet, phone numbers are not needed to send pictures and videos to another person. All that’s needed is a username that is readily available on the search bar. Once the username is found, a picture can easily be sent to that chosen username. Unlike other social networking websites, Snapchat does not allow users to be private. Pictures can be sent and received by anyone.

“Even though you can only see the picture for a given time, it gives people opportunities to send inappropriate pictures that either don’t want to be seen by others,” said sophomore Erica Boccuzzi, “or those pictures can end up somewhere else.”

Sending inappropriate pictures, also known as “sexting”, has become one of the biggest concerns for parents and adults. According to cnn.com, it is difficult to say whether teenagers are using the application to send nude and racy photos.

However, there are blogging sites that prove otherwise. Websites like “Snapchat Sluts”, started by a “party photographer”, takes the inappropriate photographs and posts them on the Tumblr blog.

Although it is not apparent whether the pictures are directly from Snapchat, they are formatted in identical ways—nearly making it clear that the photos were taken from Snapchat.

Whether the seemingly “fun and silly” application is being used to send the pictures is still being questioned. But as for now, Woodland students are using it for one reason. Just for fun.

“You can send random pictures and videos just to your friends,” said sophomore Anna Khalid, “and it is a safe website; you pick which friends you want to add and you can block others if you feel threatened.”

In this Internet age, one saying has remained true. If you don’t do stupid things, you won’t have to face stupid consequences.

WHAT DO YOU THINK? IS SNAPCHAT A DANGEROUS SOCIAL NETWORK? COMMENT BELOW.