Twenty-four hours. Videos, photos, boomerangs: extemporaneous fragments of life. Instagram Stories, a tool that the famous social network copied from the less fortunate Snapchat, is a way to reply to the classic question What are you doing?
Why should we use only words when we can tell our life through the images? And why shouldn’t give, even to the most ordinary moments, a touch of color? To share photos and thoughts on social networks seemed an arrival point, but Instagram Stories changed something. Online contents last only twenty-four hours, small pieces of private life offered to the followers. Banalities? Never! If a friend calls you while you are getting a tan, probably you would say to him that you lay baking on the beach. But if you post a story on Instagram Stories, it isn’t the same old story. Even the most boring activities can be ‘sell’ in a hilarious and fun way. Add a filter, some hashtags and fancy stickers, and a cool geotag and it’s done.
Sometimes to exist on social networks is easier than to survive in the real jungle. And Stories in the end are just a window that, in a few seconds, allows you to show outside what you want to tell about you.
It’s a perception game, we want to look happy because being so is our only wish. A boomerang with a toast together with friends, a video with a crazy singing moment in the car, a shot with your favorite outfit before to go out. And then? What happened after Instagram Stories? Bottles empty, friends go away, make-up is removed and masks fall down. Framing becomes wider and real life arises.
But to dream is a right. A bracket that lasts a day to remember that something beautiful, in this hard world, exists. It’s important to share a tile of joy but it shouldn’t be ostentation. We could desire to plunge into a beautiful boomerang to live again and again those seconds that made us happy, but the biggest achievement is pushing play and go on in the real life.
Instagram Stories has the merit to make ‘more human’ even those incomparable stars that sometimes decide to show themselves in their real life, with their children, at the gym or in the morning without the make-up. And so, the window tips over and shows, for a few instants, that sincere and not glossy world that align us to the shining celebrities. It’s the social democracy.
