The Stories of our lives: Why Instagram has it all wrong.
Today, after two days of brand purpose workshopping in a co-working boardroom, I walked across a mile of empty parking lots to an edge-of town brunch spot in Greenville, South Carolina. At Biscuit Head — put some South in your mouth — I order biscuits with fried green tomatoes and eggs “sunny side up”. Assemble jams from the ‘jam bar’, sampling raspberry chocolate and lemon poppyseed. Eat, alone, reading about Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods. Slowly pour blueberry jalepeno sauce on my dish, listen to a teen nearby talk about the Bed, Bath and Beyond sale, and watch the traffic outside.
Later, I’ll get an electric blue manicure and spend 18 hrs flying home with an obese stranger for a pillow.
Instagram is a special beast. From day one its pureness and simplicity not only made it the best way to take and share photographs, but it also had a fundamentally positive influence on behaviour. Through the mists of a busy, demanding, overwhelming world we began to seek out little moments of beauty — the light glinting off a railway track, the dew on a new bloom, and yes, the perfect swirl of foam in a fresh cup of coffee. We looked to capture all that was great, good and gorgeous in the world around us.
Over time, as we got cameras of ever increasing quality on both sides of our phones and selfie culture went into over-drive, that beauty-seeking turned inward and weird. We got and generated FOMO through the artful creation of images that had less and less to do with our real lives. Instagram was being won less by bedroom photographers, and more by bedroom art directors. Then the businesses showed up with their real photographers and real art directors, and the whole thing became an equal-opportunity marketing channel for brands both personal and corporate. Nevertheless, in spite of seemingly unnecessary updates and tweaks and regardless of cultural shifts and twists, Instagram’s core remained — a place to capture and share special content that mattered.
Snapchat was the antithesis of all that. Fast, instant, throwaway. Content that inherently didn’t matter. Art undirected. And the kids loved it. The same kids that Facebook (who owns Instagram) were struggling to stay connected to, literally. So they made their own and called it Stories. “Build it, and they will come!”, Facebook seemed to scream in battle cry, whilst eying Instagram conspiratorially.
At the risk of sounding horribly out-of-touch, I’ll admit that I was recently very intentional about using Instagram Stories. Having mainly consumed Stories (rather than created them) since their launch just under a year ago, I wanted to understand the draw and appeal. The experience surprised me.
Instead of seeking out merely a beautiful ‘moment’, Stories brought the whole scene into play. Instead of that perfect swirl of foam, it became about the dull minutiae that came before, and after the fact.
The same app, the same experience and interface with which I usually honed the meaningful was now being used to bash out the meaningless. It was like scrawling with a calligraphy pen.
But, Stories was never about Instagram. Rather, Instagram was the semi-willing surrogate to Facebook’s anti-Snapchat move — hosting an unrelated feature it never would have birthed itself . Instagram, left to its own devices, would never have made Stories because that’s not where they came from. If anything, and if we’re using other products as a way to explain product development, they would have made Vimeo. Because Vimeo is about art, and beauty and creating things that matter.
And there’s the rub. An Instagram Story ought to be about capturing the special in the everyday and crafting it into something gorgeous — just as they’ve taught us to. Just as they are uniquely positioned to do.
A mile of empty car park, the slow pouring of sauce onto a plate, a person for a pillow. That’s a story, that’s an Instagram Story.
