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Poparazzi is a new photo sharing app which, as the name suggests, invites its users to become “paparazzi” with their friends (and consequently be paparazzi by them). Poparazzi bans selfies and makes it impossible to use the front camera. A personal profile can therefore only be enriched thanks to photos of the person who owns the profile taken by others, and the owner can at most decide to remove certain photos of himself that he does not want to be seen.
Poparazzi has also other peculiarities: his photos have no captions, you can not put “like”, there are no comments and there is no count of followers. It is referred to as the “app of the moment”, a bit like a few months ago it was done with Clubhouse. And just as it was at the beginning for Clubhouse, Poparazzi is currently only available for Apple devices.
Poparazzi was launched on May 24 by Austen and Alex Ma, two brothers of just under thirty years that had already tried it in 2019 with a voice app called TTYL (from the English acronym “talk to you later”). The idea behind TTYL was to create a digital space where users could connect and talk to each other, in twos or even larger groups, with other friends or contacts who were online. TTYL did pretty well and raised investments worth a couple of million dollars, and in part anticipated what would become Clubhouse: but it never really broke.
Poparazzi, on the other hand, is doing much better: in its early days it was the most downloaded app on the US App Store and there is already talk of the interest in it from some larger companies and its valuation over 100 million dollars.
In an article published on Medium, what is defined as “the small team behind Poparazzi” presented the app as a sort of anti-Instagram interested in “preserving the authenticity of moments spent with friends” after ” our notice boards in the last decade they are filled with apparent perfection and modified images ». The article then says that “when we post photos of ourselves online we understandably try to share the most interesting moments of our lives”, in a “contest for attention where no one wins”. The app therefore proposes itself as a place capable of “taking the pressure off of perfection”.
The intrinsically self-referenced approach of many social networks (not surprisingly accompanied by a constant growth in number and quality of the front cameras of smartphones) has been repeatedly noticed and criticized. Although it always focuses on personal profiles, with photos taken to feed the curiosity of others, Poparazzi undoubtedly presents an approach that is innovative in its own way.
– Read also: Selfies instead of autographs
In addition to its undoubted peculiarities and its interesting perspectives, we are talking about Poparazzi – and in all probability we will talk about it for a while longer – for privacy reasons. It is in fact quite easy to envision contexts and situations in which problems could arise due to the fact that someone takes a photo of someone else without their permission and consent.
If it is true that the photographed person can have a control pre-publication on the photos taken by contacts of whom he is not friends, it is also true that in the case of photos taken by friends, you will receive a notification when the photo is published and only afterwards can you possibly choose to remove it from your profile.
It can be argued that already now, on Facebook or Instagram, anyone can post a photo of whoever they want. The fact is that, according to the most concerned, with Poparazzi this aspect could be exasperated. In addition, the app has also received some criticism related to privacy issues and the way in which, during registration, it goes to recover all the contacts that a user has on their smartphone. However, these are problems that could be solved or at least mitigated in the coming days. Already now, in its guidelines, the app invites users to publish with caution and respect only photos of which they are actually the authors, without breaking any law and “treating everyone with respect”.
– Read also: Does mediocrity triumph over TikTok?
Josh Constine, author of a newsletter on new technological trends, wrote that «Poparazzi could symbolizing post-pandemic reunion as much as Clubhouse had represented the physical distance between people during lockdowns. ” Constine appreciated the app for being collaborative (to have lots of photos of herself, others need to take lots of photos, and vice versa), for her being light and cheerful and for the fact that, making it impossible to edit photos or add strange effects, it lends itself to a quick and also quite simple use.
The term “paparazzo” is also used in the United States, as demonstrated for example by the well-known song by Lady Gaga. It is a so-called “author's word”, that is a neologism with a specific author who put it in one of his works: in his film La dolce vita, Federico Fellini chose to call Paparazzo (actually inventing the word) a character who was the photographer. As the Una word a day website explains, “the genesis of this name is uncertain and the fact that Fellini often enjoyed telling it in different ways does not help us to see clearly”.
