Snapchat, Instagram Stories, and the Internet of Forgetting

There was seemingly nothing wrong with Instagram, up to the moment that it underwent an identity crisis. Each day, as usual, some three hundred million users had been meticulously curating and sharing images of their lives, meals, selves, and bookshelves. Earlier this week, though, the app took a hard right turn. It introduced Stories, a feature that allows users to post photos and videos, sometimes embellished with text and illustrations, in a kind of slide show, which automatically disappears after twenty-four hours. The content must have been recorded recently—nothing older than a day can be uploaded—so the result is like viewing the backstage footage rather than the rehearsed performance. Stories looked nothing like Instagram and everything like Snapchat, another app that has for years offered users a platform for this very same interaction.