Watching Instagram Stories generates a collective speculative temporality akin to newspaper reading

Evidence

In the preceding discussion, I have highlighted two important blind spots in the tropes of technological surveillance: their neglect of the shifting social morphologies undergirding our image-hungry, financialized capitalism and their unhelpful obfuscation of the active roles we play in producing (but also in curating and reposting) the images on which such technologies feed. In the remainder of this chapter, therefore, I would like to consider a final, important aspect of speculative technologies: the distinct, collective temporal experience they generate. I have likened the activity of watching content on Instagram Stories to the reading of newspapers in Anderson’s Imagined Communities, emphasizing the effects of speed, movement, and impermanence, which, together, lead to a characteristic, speculative simultaneity. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 209

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘speculative simultaneity’ as a named mechanism of collective temporal experience on social platforms.
• XREF: Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities — the reader has deep grounding in communication-as-culture theory via Carey; worth leveraging. — connects to: Ephemeral social media trains attention on the present moment via embodied swiping — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 211