Social media stories create a simultaneous temporality built on speed and impermanence

Evidence

Hence, the transition to image-based standardization and simultaneity presents important new questions around the temporality of speculative communities. The commodified technologies of connectivity of financialized capitalism combine speed and impermanence with visual movements. In the physical swiping, tapping, and scrolling and the virtual repetitive motions of TikTok memes, image now blends with text in novel ways. The backlog of Facebook’s or Instagram’s feed remains “there,” in the background, but it is the short-lived “story” format that thrives in the contracted time span of a vertiginous present. Instagram Stories, used by more than one billion accounts globally as of summer 2020, are fast becoming the most popular mode of “sharing” content online. Their duration corresponds to the twenty-four-hour bracket that was once covered by print newspapers, though of course Stories do not offer top-down national/local “news” but rather an algorithmically generated blend of user-generated representations (of their current experiences) and targeted business advertising (which constitutes about a third of the total uploaded content). “Speculative simultaneity” thus differs from “imagined simultaneity” in the importance it places on speed, movement, and impermanence. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 94

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘speculative simultaneity’ against Anderson’s ‘imagined simultaneity’ via the 24-hour story format.
• CANDY: Instagram Stories surpassing one billion accounts is a light, quotable stat.
• XREF: connects to: Modern life erodes integrated experience, replacing narration with information and shocks — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 623; Event-spectacle media culture causes the postmodern collapse of time horizons — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 394; Digital-native generations experience time as disconnected micro-slices — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 53 (+1 more)