Stories on Social Media

Today I received a Partiful invite to a party this weekend and I was looking through the RSVP list and clicking on people I knew. One person I clicked on shared their Instagram handle on their profile and that put me down a rabbit hole of thinking about Instagam and the evolution of it. Primarily the way we interact with Instagram and how we interact with others in Instagram.

Now if you are a boomer like me, you would remember that when Instagram first came out, people were posting everything, from the littlelest of things to the biggest of things for all their followers to see. Then at some point, our perception of ourselves and others contributed to Instagram being a place of highly curated, intentional moments to make our lives appear in a certain way (or atleast that is how I believe my generation is interactin with Instagram) though I am seeing more of this interesting counter culture coming into play where people are being “cringe” and posting whatever they want.

That is another interesting topic for another day but for today I wanted to place my attention on how posts are too permanent and in their permanence in this digital space, they’re more vulnerable to being perceived and more importantly, open to both being critically analyzed and mass consumed. And then Instagram introduced stories and I feel like stories was what social media posts were supposed to be like. Stories still have an air of curation behind them but they also feel more “authentic” than posts. Stories disappear after 24 hours and in that ephemerality, I wonder if it allows us and even perhaps encourages us to be a little bit more authentic when we know that this moment is recorded in time but not observed as intensely as a post.