Are we moving toward a world of non-verbal communication?

An article in The Atlantic entitled “Why ‘Stories’ took over your smartphone” cites Chris Cox, Facebook’s Chief Product Officer, who says Facebook and Instagram’s Stories format “is on a path to surpass feeds as the primary way people share things with their friends sometime next year.”

Launched in August 2016 after several unsuccessful attempts to copy Snapchat, Instagram Stories took less than a year to overtake its rival, in part by having attracted older users to the genre. Most of Instagram Stories’ growth has been in new user segments, and is increasingly being seen as the natural format for smartphones, using the camera for short videos that can be edited, rather than photographs.

What does the fact that people want to share edited videos on the social networks tell us? Firstly that they’re using more bandwidth and are presumably prepared to pay for it; and secondly, the growing popularity of visual formats around the world to share the arts, leisure, sport, or whatever that can be understood by people regardless of the language they speak.

We’ve seen this before with emojis, a universal language if ever there was one, that now enable people to communicate, albeit very basically: a set of immediately understandable ideograms that that can be used to express feelings, ideas or concepts and that are particularly popular among young people.

GIFs are similar: they became a popular cross-cultural communication tool after huge numbers of them were indexed on the larger social media platforms they became a popular way to express an idea, often alongside a text or as part of a conversation. In fact, animated GIFs originate in all sorts of places, and may first have been seen in relation to say, a television series in one country, but end up being adopted internationally in places where that program was never seen.

Increasingly global and inter-connected communities of people are now using cross-platform communication tools (collections of emojis or animated GIFs are available on practically all the social networks, with little difference between them, along with the short video format) with text and language of secondary importance. These are formats that soon spread to other demographics, the defining characteristic of which is that they have a shelf-life of just 24 hours.

A fad, or a change in the way we communicate?

(En español, aquí)