Instagram Stories has turned life into a slideshow of content
By Sam Wolfson — The Guardian — November 21, 2017
“Disruptive” is a horrible buzzword, beloved by vape-huffing Silicon Valley types, because it implies that whatever bit of nonsense they are making is changing people’s lives rather than just an update. Truly disruptive innovations don’t happen in a flash but percolate over time until you barely remember what life was like before: such as when you had to plan what time your taxi was going to pick you up three hours before you wanted to leave; or sit on a train with a crossword book because there was nothing else to do.
The problem with supposedly disruptive technology is often not the tech itself but the people using it. Apple, for example, can make all the epoch-defining updates to sync our watch to our toaster, but most of us won’t experience them because we have three different iCloud accounts and keep forgetting the passwords.
I consider myself relatively tech-savvy, but that does not mean my online personas are well kept. Facebook is always begging me to update my profile pic. My limited Twitter presence is all sarcasm and virtue signalling, for fear any earnest expression will be ripped apart. The picture that appears when my girlfriend texts me is an Apple stock photo of some blue eggs, because that’s all I could set it to on my laptop, which is still running a five-year-old operating system I’m too scared to update.
That has been the central battle of technology; for all the fearmongering about knowing us better than we know ourselves and stealing our data — we just can’t be bothered to keep feeding the beast with our true ID.
The photosharing app Instagram was struggling with this just over a year ago: users were over-curating their visual identity, waiting weeks to post that perfect shot. So it launched Stories, basically a copy of another app, Snapchat, which is aimed more at a teen audience. On Instagram Stories you still post photos and videos, but they play like a slideshow among everyone else’s posts. Everything you post can be seen for only 24 hours, after which it disappears for ever, giving it a sense of urgency. Now, we can’t help but turn our very existence into transient content for our acquaintances.
Almost immediately in this, the golden age of television, Instagram Stories became the hottest new show. It’s the first thing I watch when I wake up, a 20-minute capsule of everything my friends were up to the day before: the screaming karaoke, the arty holiday snaps and screengrabs of outrageous work emails they have received — it’s like Good Morning Britain, but presented by all my drunk mates instead of Piers Morgan. Except it’s better than TV, because it’s also there throughout the day, a hyper-local news bulletin whenever you want. Plus, it’s interactive: at the flick of a finger you can skip any friends whose lives have become too drab — another trip to that neon signage warehouse? Really? And Instagram quietly notes your decision, shuffling their stories a little lower down the pack next time, so only your most fabulous friends stay at the top.
When Stories launched it changed human behaviour almost immediately, gameifying life so that each event you attend earns you social kudos. Went to a warehouse rave and a gallery opening in the same evening? Get you, Ms Diverse, a tale of two cities! On a relaxing minibreak? Turn it into a live travel documentary, every bad English menu translation and overweight man sunbathing must be caught on camera.
It’s the vague competitive element — the need to stay atop people’s feeds or occasionally get a private message saying “where are you?? looks lush” — that keeps everyone playing. Terrifyingly, stories are not private unless you set them to be, so if you were to go on the location page for, say, Pacha in Ibiza, you could see scores of strangers pulling shapes and blowing kisses, pupils zipping round their eyes like pinballs.
I recently booked a holiday to Ukraine, in the back of my mind, no doubt, thinking about some great Soviet kitsch Insta stories I could post while there. But two weeks beforehand, I saw that my friend Fred was on the same trip, stealing all the Instagram stories that were rightfully mine. The cosy double bunks on the sleeper train from Kiev to Odessa. Stolen! The waxwork museum where you can get your picture taken between Osama bin Laden and Neytiri from Avatar. Stolen! It was so bad that I bought a bar of triangular chocolate at the Chernobyl tuckshop just so I could at least get some gratification from my caption: “Chernobylerone” (nine responses: “hahaha”, “so good”, cry laughy face, etc).
It goes without saying that this peacocking is terrible for everyone’s sense of self-worth. Instagram has been found to be the worst social platform for our mental health. Who wouldn’t feel miserable after deciding to have a night in with some All-Bran for dinner only to see fake versions of everyone else they know having more fun. Yet still we keep at it. By April of this year, just nine months after it launched, Instagram Stories had 200 million daily users, surpassing Snapchat’s total number of users by 40 million.
If you’re feeling smug while reading this, another nonsense tech trend you won’t have anything to do with, I’m sorry to tell you: technology is coming for you, too. In the past year, Facebook, WhatsApp and the job networking site LinkedIn have launched Snapchat-like features. Even your iPhone has started making non-consensual highlight reels of your recent photos. It’s only a matter of time before your GP and the DVLA do, too.
Instagram Stories and Snapchat have made us, on a mass scale, do the thing tech companies have always been begging us to do — willingly document every part of our lives in as much detail as possible. Instead of having to read our emails or learn from our Amazon orders, we’re finally providing them the access they so desperately crave.
Originally published at : https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/21/instagram-stories-life-slideshow-contents-snapchat