HOW TWO YEARS OF INSTAGRAM STORIES HAS ALTERED THE WAY WE

LOVE, ACT AND PLAY

Millions of us have embraced the 'film it all' era of social media. But what at first
felt like carefree fun has for many become an endless, anxious routine of 'brand
maintenance' that makes us act in ways we don't like or recognise. After a late
night epiphany, Olivia Ovenden looks at where we are two years into the Stories
experiment

BY OLIVIA OVENDEN
01/08/2018

1 I first realised Instagram Stories had changed my friends while sitting

outside a pub earlier this year. It was the point in a Friday night when drinks
begin to linger on the table as everyone privately debates whether to go home.
It wasn't a moment worth capturing, but when someone came back from the bar
with a phone held up, everyone tried to make it look like one. Glasses were raised
and middle fingers thrown at the camera to show the exaggerated hallmarks of
people having fun.

2 It was the same self-conscious performance I’d given when my boyfriend

recorded me driving through Ireland on New Year’s Day, the Story where you
could hear my voice change key when I noticed I was being filmed.
Once I'd seen how visible the con was I saw it in everything: the exaggerated
dance-floor performances, the seaside star jumps, the cocktails clinking against
azure skies. If you pulled back the curtain, I wondered, was anyone having as
much fun as appeared?

3 Instagram Stories launched two years ago as an effort to attract young

users who had opted for the spontaneous and ephemeral platform Snapchat
instead. At the time, Instagram was plateauing in terms of engagement as people
painstakingly curated their feeds, spending less on the app per day as a result.
The idea worked. As of June 2018, the feature has 400 million daily users - more
than double that of Snapchat - and has become a lurking eye over after work
pints and holiday sunrises around the world.
4 When it launched users could only upload photographs and videos from the
last 24 hours and the Story would then vanish after the same time period. It
meant that footage of you howling ‘Hotel California’ at 3am was safely scrubbed a
day later, and unlike the main feed there was no risk of being embarrassed by a
filtered selfie which didn’t reach 20 likes.

5 The number of people who look at your Story wasn't visible to anyone else,
and you’d never know how many watched you while rolling their eyes. In that
sense it offered the ultimate social media experience for 2018: the possibility to
broadcast yourself without the downside of having to await public judgement.
You don't know whether anyone 'liked' what you posted, but you don't know that
they didn't, either.

6 But using Instagram Stories wasn't entirely free of anxiety. What you could
see whenever you posted was a list of people who watched, the people who
wanted to peek into your life. The downside of having a virtual guest list is that it
soon instilled the constant need to throw a party.

7 After two years of Instagram Stories, holidays, which could once offer a
reprieve from using social media, have become a documentary that opens with
the 4am taxi to the airport, moves onto the first ice cold beer held in front of the
deep blue sea and then charts every moment - exciting or bland - until you land
back home ('Take me back!').

8 A study from earlier this year found that more than a third of
millennials have intentionally posted misleading photos to make their holiday
seem better than it is and 65% of those do so specifically to make others envious.
We all want to be having the most wild time in the most beautiful place, and a
few snapshots on the main feed is no longer evidence enough that we are.

9 Katie, 24, found this competitiveness made her holiday with friends feel
forced. “I went to Greece and found myself putting on this act as if I was on a
reality show,” she tells me. “I could tell my friends and I were trying to make the
holiday look incredible in the Stories we took.”
10 As well as turning holidays into a highlights reel, Stories has forever altered
the witching hours of drunken evenings out which are now witnessed by
hundreds before the night even ends. On Sunday mornings I now watch a
sped-up reel of friends and fleeting acquaintances doing shots or wrestling on
the night bus like a trailer advertising their Saturday night.

11 “I have definitely seen my friends acting up for the camera,” 30-year-old

Matt tells me. “It’s always been the case with Instagram but Stories make it so
much worse because you’re basically encouraged to share as much as possible.”
Dating, now, also has the added pressure and thrill of knowing exactly when
someone you like has looked at what you’ve uploaded. The downside is that this
becomes a game of cat and mouse that requires a lot of 'brand maintenance'.
Lara, 27, tells me she found recording a digest of her day to impress someone
exhausting. “I had to delete the app on my phone for a while because I would
stage these ridiculous scenes when drunk to impress a guy I was dating,” she says.
“I hoped it made my life look like some non-stop party but looking back they
were so awful. Even when I was sober I’d get dressed up, post something
misleading and see how long until he looked at it.”

12 The impulse to turn the story bar into a breadcrumb trail of tiny dots
means nowhere is safe, and instils the idea that a meal or workout aren't real
unless seen by an audience.

13 Dr. Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center, says
that wanting to present our best selves on Instagram Stories is a mixture of
aspiration and the human need to be validated and accepted by others, but rarely
involves acting “authentically and without self-consciousness.”

14 “The desire to be liked and receive positive feedback and social validation is
normal,” Dr Rutledge says. "[However] preoccupation with self-presentation, to
the point where it interferes with other goals or dominates self-value, reflects
issues with low self-esteem and confidence.” She warns that obsessing with how
we present ourselves online, “allows others to have the power to define your
value.”
15 A 2017 study found Instagram to be the worst social network in terms of its
impact on mental health, linking it to depression and anxiety. Stories has not
been studied enough yet individually for us to fully understand its psychological
impact, but it's difficult to see how spending yet more time on the app will do
anything but make those issues worse. On the first anniversary of launching
Stories, Instagram reported they had seen a significant increase in the time users
were spending on the app. Users younger than 25 were now spending more than
32 minutes a day on the app on average. For those aged 25 and older, the figure
was 24 minutes.

16 For a long time, an urban myth about the Stories 'viewed' list was that the
people who stalked your profile the most showed up at the top. Instagram
fiercely guards the algorithm that dictates how this is actually ranked - probably
so users can believe what they want to believe - but more recently have
been forced to admit it’s a combination of a number of factors, including the
frequency with which we visit a certain profile and how much we interact with
that account by liking their posts or by messaging them.

17 Whatever the exact truth, the fact we're so keen to buy into the idea that the
top of the list is people who are most interested in us demonstrates the fantasy
game we all play with Instagram Stories. Why do we swipe through other
people’s updates, usually thinking how banal they are, but somehow believe
people are enraptured by our own escapades?

18 The viewed list, always larger than who might like a post in your feed, gives
the impression lots of people care what we’re doing, even though we know in
reality most people are flicking through because they're bored. Everyone I spoke
said they believed their own Stories were interesting and admitted to
re-watching them. “I know it’s not what really happened but it’s a nice edited
memory,” Matt tells me.

19 In a sense, Stories are just a nice edited memory, and one that fulfils a basic
human compulsion to feel people are interested in us. Dr Rutledge doesn’t
believe recording in this way is necessarily harmful, arguing: “If capturing an
event allows people to revisit positive emotions and memories, then it is serving
an important purpose.” Like all social media, Stories are another way for us to
reach into the crowd of the internet and say, here I am.

20 In a darker sense, Instagram Stories represents our biggest step yet through
the looking glass into a world where our real life behaviour is constantly tailored
to make ourselves look better on the internet, a world where the lines between
on and offline are forever blurred, where we sit smiling and clinking glasses
outside a pub while knowing the real memory of that evening was us privately
calculating how long until we could leave.

21 With Stories, you don’t get the closure or validation of a list of likes, so you
are offering yourself up over and over again, the illuminated purple and amber
halo spinning forever like a sinkhole drawing you in. Where the only aim is to be
watched, even if you're not really being seen.