Almost two decades ago, I read an article that really was a foundational work in how I based my role in the internet ecosystem. It’s always stuck with me, and I truly do think about this all the time and it’s something that I always keep in mind when posting.
This article was written by a certain internet citizen, which was really a response to cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken’s post about microblogging being a form of phatic communication.
McCracken still maintains his blog, but his original article was wiped off the web; you can still find it here:
At the time, Facebook was peaking and Twitter had just begun to pop off. Those were some of the main microblogging sites back in the day, and as the monetization machine hadn’t made it truly profitable to gain retweets and shares in the attention economy, posting for the sake of microblogging was still well and alive. Don’t think the Twitter post attention economy is like that anymore, unfortunately.
Nowadays, Instagram stories has become the dominant form of phatic communication that most normal people here use. Instagram has stopped being a form of Flickr and instead has become Twitter, and Twitter has become some sort of perpetual attention-consensus-building marketing machine, the closest thing to a spiritual Roman forum that any other internet forum could be. There is much more signal than noise than on pre-Elon Twitter, for sure, for the majority of users. Too much signal in fact, making it more of a macroblogging platform than a microblogging platform and driving true microblogging - a bit of signal (a keep-alive!) and a ton of noise - elsewhere.
A feature on IG Stories is the ephemeral nature of posts, where the context window is what happened in the last 24 hours. I think that really moves it into the realm where a story is a cry for acknowledgment of existence, a true microblogging platform. Personally, I think it’s preferable to use it as such rather than as a marketing machine.