The ephemeral social-media story format embodies a new speed-based speculative simultaneity

Evidence

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’ by contrast with Anderson’s ‘imagined simultaneity’ — core to the homo speculans concept.
• XREF: Connects to Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities, explicitly invoked in the following paragraph; also connects to the reader’s core task of showing speculative logic migrating into self-presentation.
• SEED: The twinning of the 24-hour newspaper news cycle replaced by algorithmic ephemeral Stories is an essay angle on how ‘newsworthiness’ and presence-time have collapsed into one.