The ‘stories’ of my life

In the last post, I tried to discuss how the users’ FoMO (fear of missing out) effects and reinforces their constant participating of reading or posting Instagram Stories. Refusing to lose the possession of moments, Instagram Stories enables their users reduce the negative feeling and strengthens the positive emotional feed-backs. And I also mention the scarcity of time contributes to another reinforcement of users’ posting which in a way adds up more value comparing to a post. Last but not least, it is the presenting in a social-media platform that gives their users to feel ‘presented’. However, in today’s blog post, I particularly would like to share my own observation to some of the cases of Instagram Stories (mostly from my friends) in which some unique ways being adopted to attract audiences.

Written in these walls are the stories that I can’t explain
I leave my heart open but it stays right here empty for days
– One Direction <The Story of My life>

Instagram Stories, in my own estimation, includes two most essential aspects of communication: the delivery from the speaker and the responses from the listener. For me,in most of the cases, users use the Instagram this platform to keep records of their lives. And for most of them, the incentives to posting Instagram Stories is in a part to invite ‘audience’ to take a look at these records and to some extent to make them respond to theses records. For posing an Instagram Story, from the selection of photos or videos to be posted to what filters should be applied, what captions or lines to be added, or different ‘functions’ ( see more on https://socialbuddy.com/instagram-stories/ to create a Instagram Stories) to be used, it all goes through a really quick (sometimes it takes a while) of a thinking process of how to get people reacted to this Story. We first have to know that during the experience of reading Instagram Stories, if we don’t feel like finishing a story we could tap or swipe right to the next. And if we do feel like stay on a story for a while, we could hold the story by not leaving your finger on the screen (or after few seconds the story will proceed automatically to the next one). In common cases, in order to make audience to reply, the Instagram Stories are usually not included with too many information on it. Often it is just a nice picture with couple words on it or sometimes a GIF or hashtag or the location. Nevertheless, in some cases, we could observe the phenomena that some Insta users adopt some different ways of posting Instagram Stores. Here I choose a few categories and list below.

Type 1 : Essay Writers. These types of Instagram Stories usually includes an abundant information such as a complete narrative of how the user himself drinks a cup of coffee. But most of the time people become essay writers so as to release negative emotion. In this type of Stories, sometimes we could see the users will shrink the size of words to the minimum. In order to respond, the readers have to spend extra time on one single post and find out there are ten more Stories like this to be read on the following.

Type 2: Citizens in the movie Upside Down. If we pay attention to the readers’ habit of using mobiles, we will notice that most of users like to hold their mobiles vertical instead of horizontal. But for citizens in Upside Down, they usually post Stories from a different angle which requires the readers to adjust their phone to read. In this way, however, most of readers do spend time reading these types of Instagram Stories out of the curiosity of the content.

Type 3: Busy Bees. This term is actually used to describe the readers’ status when we are reading this type of Instagram Stories. When we read this type of Instagram Stories, we are being kept busy doing different jobs: voting, responding to questions, or putting on earphones because it says ‘sounds on’.

to be continued…