A good article in The New Yorker called “Snapchat, Instagram Stories and the internet of forgetting“, discusses the launch of Instagram Stories, which in many people’s view is the best copy of Snapchat ever created – at the third attempt following the previous failures of Facebook Poke and Slingshot – and proof of how the internet is moving from being a place where we store things permanently, where we store our memories, to one of expressing ourselves in real time, and that once published, disappears within 24 hours. After initially looking as though young people would only use Instagram Stories to ask for follows on Snapchat, now the app is becoming more popular and winning over users from a wider age group than Snapchat has attracted, while the founder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom, openly admits that the concept is Snapchat’s and that copying is seen in Silicon Valley as valuable.
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Things changed with Snapchat. Nobody really knows if the change was about not wanting reminders of things we’d done popping up 20 years down the road, or whether it was about doing something different to our parents, or about privacy, or perhaps a mix of all of them from the perspective of a generation that has become perfectly used to carrying a camera that is essentially a powerful computer around, but the truth is that young people discovered a new way to use the internet, a way in which the value was in the moment, the conversation, the joke, the wink: like a conversation at the bar, which nobody imagines anybody else is listening to, and much less recording. The youngest generation feels more comfortable without anybody eavesdropping on them, and decided to use a new communication channel for fleeting conversations.
See more at: forbesc.com
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