UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM
Faculty of Humanities
Story of Stories:
towards a format for storytelling in mobile apps
Péter Füssy
Student number: 12382817
Master Thesis
Research Master’s in Media Studies Supervisor: dr. Anne Helmond
ABSTRACT
From books to virtual reality, storytelling has been increasingly mediatized and taken up by mobile apps. WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, among others, are tools for storytelling used by millions, each one of them with its own particularities but with one thing in common: Stories. Since 2013, Snapchat’s innovation for sharing ephemeral photos and videos is emerging as a desirable feature in different contexts of digital communication. Even though Stories are arguably responsible for new practices, the history of its development was at the risk of being erased by every update. Drawing from empirical app studies (Gerlitz et al., 2019), this study reconstructs a biography of Stories with particular attention at affordances to reflect the complex coevolution of users and the digital environment (Bucher & Helmond, 2017). This intricate narrative shows that Stories is more than a feature: it stretches toward a format (Jancovic et al., 2020) with independent updates, specific sets of aesthetic features, and its own ecosystem of users, advertisers and developers. As the format travels across apps, it is possible to see a “format economy” and a “format vernacular”. In addition to exploring app history methodologies, the story of Stories brings light to standardization processes in digital media and calls for further research using this framework.
TABLE OF CONTENT
1. Introduction 1
2. Literature review 6
3. Theoretical framework 9
3.1 Empirical app studies 9
3.2 Standards and formats 11
3.3 Affordances 14
4. Methodology 17
5. Story of Stories 21
5.1 From communication to storytelling (2013-2016) 21
5.2 From dialect to common language (2016-2019) 42
6. Discussion 53
7. References 57
1. Introduction
We tell stories every day to others and to ourselves. Be it fiction or nonfiction, storytelling has recently become a fundamental piece to understand what is human culture (Kearney, 2009; Gottschall, 2012; Storr, 2019). Stories allow us to share knowledge, build social links, and make sense of the world and of who we are. They can be tactile, visual, and audible signs that bring to life distant universes and feelings. As Jonathan Gottschall suggests, the human brain is “wired” for stories and stories can “rewire” the brain. Following a similar distinction, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt says the main function of the brain is to process stories, not logic (2012). Therefore, how we tell and share stories matter. In a general sense, a story is a narrative or tale which recounts a series of events (Baldick, 1996). Yet, for centuries, theories have been formulated to understand the interrelation between elements that make a story more compelling. In hisPoetics, Aristotle proposes “to inquire into the structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem” but first defines the poetic arts as modes of imitation which differ from one another by “the medium, the objects, [and] the manner” (Aristotle & Heath, 1996). At that time, Aristotle's experience of media was limited by paintings, speech, music, and dance. Other philosophers and theorists saw in the next two thousand years how storytelling was transformed with new possibilities opened by different media. From oral tradition to writing, from painting to photography, from cinema to virtual reality, the history of how we tell stories is also a history of the media that facilitate sharing, absorbing, and reproducing those narratives.
Stories have always been mediated, thus shaped by media specificities. However, as recent studies in social science and cultural studies show (Couldry & Hepp, 2013; Hjarvard, 2008), the concept of mediation is not enough to understand the twofold connection between cultural practices and the ever-increasing presence of media, not only in storytelling but in different aspects of society. Instead of mediation, the notion of mediatization has come forth as a way to understand the co-evolution of social practices and the media. As Hepp explains, mediatization “refers to an experience everybody is acquainted with in his or her everyday life: technological communication media saturate more and more social domains which are drastically transforming at the same time” (Hepp, 2019, p. 3). Despite the fact that the phenomenon seems to have accelerated in the past couple of decades, it can be said that mediatization has been going on since the dawn of literacy. The last “wave” of profound changes in media that have affected society is characterized by the digitalization of a wide range of processes and relations (Finnemann, 2011). Not surprisingly, storytelling has also
become digital as a part of that process. After the first personal computers were connected to the Internet, how we tell stories has rapidly adapted to new devices and platforms. Most recently, mobile applications have taken up digital storytelling, making each smartphone user a potential digital storyteller. What differs, though, digital storytelling from the previous forms? According to Lundby, “the multimodality of the digital, with the endless possibilities to combine text, sound, graphics, video, and still images, goes way beyond the received forms of storytelling” (Lundby et al., 2017, p. 1074). Not by coincidence, one of the tools used by millions every day to share audiovisual narratives via mobile devices is called Stories. Stories are a popular feature for producing and sharing photos and videos mainly via smartphones. The feature is available in apps such as Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, and LinkedIn, among others.
This thesis focuses on the new media format of Stories. Originally launched by Snapchat in 2013, Stories are a chronological string of photos and videos that lasts (mostly) for 24 hours and can be watched by some or all of your contacts. By then, Snapchat was better known for the exchange of private photos or videos that disappeared after ten seconds, which were seen as a catalyst for sexting among teenagers (Poltash, 2012). I must admit that Stories did not get my attention immediately, only about three years later when the feature was included in Instagram, and a friend of mine published a parody of a Mexican soap-opera in the Stories format. Each scene was a ten-second long video shot with the smartphone in the upright position and uploaded in order to create a narrative with beginning and end. It felt so different from the experience with other social media which also allowed videos but required specific tools for editing or sorted posts non-chronologically. And the Stories were ephemeral. Unlike the archiving profiles characteristic from social media timelines, Stories were gone after 24 hours. After becoming a success among young users of Snapchat, the same Stories features started to appear also on Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Facebook. The spread of the feature like a viral content turned Stories into a meme (Fig. 1), making fun of the tendency and predicting that more electronic devices would have Stories embedded in the interface, from graphic calculators to pregnancy tests (Koerber, 2017; Kircher, 2017). Although those devices still do not have Stories, the feature has expanded roughly with the same aspects in distinct platforms like the video-sharing platform YouTube, the business-oriented LinkedIn, the microblog Twitter and the privacy-concerned messaging app Signal. How Stories have developed functions that seem to be applicable and desirable in such different contexts of digital communication?
Fig. 1: Reaction to Stories design spree across apps in 2017 (Source: knowyourmeme.com)
Scholars from diverse fields have pointed out the implications and the reasons for the rise of ephemeral content on social media. From the perspective of users practices, disappearing stories encourage users to “show the moment” (Georgakopoulou, 2017), minimizing the necessity of curation and a consistent presentation of self (McRoberts et al., 2017; Villaespesa & Wowkowych, 2020). Going against the archival and profiling practices from previous social media, ephemeral storytelling also brings back something from the oral tradition. For instance, Soffer compares Stories narratives to “fireside talks”, where a communal feeling grows within the group listening to the same story (Soffer, 2016). This resonates with visual studies that pinpoint a transformation in the function of photographs and videos towards more communicative and social aspects, as opposed to archiving of memories (Larsen & Sandbye, 2014; Lobinger, 2015). Beyond personal uses, Stories are also changing industries.
Within journalism studies, Stories appear as a potential tool to attract attention of a new audience and, consequently, revenue (Canella, 2018; Vázquez-Herrero et al., 2019). For the advertising industry, the feature is seen as a more “engaging” way to distribute ads especially for a younger audience (Belanche et al., 2019). Regarding shapes and sizes of audiovisual content, Stories are a strong actor for the legitimization of the vertical 9:16 aspect ratio (Neil & Ross, 2018; Leaver et al., 2020). All of those are examples of how the feature has influenced the recent mediatization wave of storytelling, allowing new social and commercial practices to
emerge. However, most of those studies are like photographs, frozen images of a specific configuration of Stories in time. As photographs, they do not capture the natural ability of software and mobile apps to adapt rapidly and improve with feedback generated from users’ data. What users can do with Stories and what Stories represent to the app is constantly changing. In that respect, this research brings a historical view on how Stories evolved over time across apps in relation to the apps’ users and business models. By examining the features historically, we gain insights into how different types of actors and interests influence the development of Stories’ capabilities.
In order to do that, I suggest examining Stories from the perspective of a format. According to Volmar, Jancovic and Schneider (2020), formats can be understood generally as “specific sets of designed and negotiated features and functions that determine the aesthetic configurations of a medium, produce and reflect diverse relations of cooperation, and refer to different domains of application and models of monetization” (p. 7). Seeing an app feature as a format is not usual but the reason for doing that is twofold: it allows to explore Stories outside the limits of an individual app while taking into account the infrastructure and the historical negotiation between diverse actors shaping its configuration. Moreover, it is not usual to study formats within and across apps, since apps are mostly short-lived and formats take time to consolidate. Yet, it is already possible to bring formats and apps together as the accelerated environment for apps calls for short development cycles and reduced costs, making standardization a highly sought-after solution. If on one hand, apps' brief existence could facilitate the task of doing app history, on the other hand, apps are resistant to historicization by default. The story of Stories is one that risks being lost by the apps’ peculiar disposition of overwriting its own history in every update (Helmond & van der Vlist, 2020). Once the app is updated, the previous version is erased from the device and from the store. Only applying treacherous methods one can go back to a previous version. Therefore, a biography of Stories is also necessary to track its development so far and give support to future research. A biography, which is best known as a literature genre that describes a person’s life, is also a useful approach to understand how the life of digital objects are also intertwined with technological infrastructures, cultural practices and socio economic interests (see Burgess & Baym, 2020). Furthermore, a biography can be of interest not only for researchers but also for general users of the apps who are curious about technology. By understanding how Stories are assembled, it may lead to new and unexpected uses.
Drawing from format studies (Jankovic et al., 2019) and empirical app studies (Gerlitz et al., 2019), the next chapters set out to build a concise account of Stories’ evolution that may give light to standardization processes in mobile apps and the rationale behind it. Firstly, I demonstrate that format studies are adequate for this object and indicate how they can benefit from the methodological approach of empirical app studies. While format studies bring a historical perspective that helps to trace and understand the evolution of aesthetic conditions and the practical affordances of a medium, empirical app studies provide a more tailored approach to analyze apps and further develops the concept of affordances to allow exploration of questions regarding interfaces, business models, and the intricate relations between human and non-human actors. Then, different sources are used to build a timeline of the evolution of Stories on Snapchat and Instagram with particular attention to the affordances ruling the conditions for storytelling. This timeline is critically reconstructed in pursuance of intended and unintended uses, and social and economic influences. As a result, the biography of Stories reveals the negotiation between users and apps regarding the evolution of affordances and also uncovers the power relations built into the emergence of Stories as a current format for storytelling in mobile apps.
2. Literature review
Stories have been so far researched as a tool inside Snapchat or Instagram. However, the feature did not elicit as many studies as the more ephemeral communication via direct messages in Snapchat (Katz & Crocker, 2015; Kofoed & Larsen, 2016; Bayer et al., 2016; Piwek & Joinson, 2016). It makes sense most of all because Snapchat broke some of the rules of social media and did not present a public timeline where people could see what was being shared, reproduced, and discussed. Therefore, scholars tried to access the content and the practices of ephemeral messages mostly through interviews. Besides studies concerned with potential dangers of ephemeral media among teenagers (Poltash, 2012), Snapchat is seen generally as a media that allows more intimacy and spontaneity than Instagram, which is a place for more performative self-presentation (Smith & Sanderson, 2015; Jackson & Luchner, 2018) and even narcissism (Sheldon & Bryant, 2016; Moon et al., 2016). In its turn, Instagram provided researchers with unprecedently big data sets of public photographs which prompted quantitative and qualitative analysis of new photographic practices (Hu et al., 2014; Tifentale & Manovich, 2015). Although those perceptions are valid for direct messages in Snapchat and for Instagram’s timeline, they do not apply completely for Stories.
For instance, studies suggest that entertainment is a bigger factor than social networking of information behind the motivation to use Stories (Coa & Setiawan, 2017; Ko & Yu, 2019). Even though they are not as ephemeral as snaps, Snapchat Stories maintained a less staged and more experimental component. By way of illustration, in the context of a museum, research pointed out that the use of Stories is “shaped by temporary features that motivate minimal editing” and by interchangeability of videos and photography (Villaespesa & Wowkowych, 2020). In contrast with Instagram’s performative self-presentation, McRoberts et al. (2017) claims that “Snapchat Stories allows people to share quotidian & out-of-the-ordinary moment to experiment with self-presentation to a self-selecting audience (from close ties to strangers) without needing to maintain a consistent presentation of self” (p. 6905). From the perspective of marketing studies, Instagram Stories “enhances consumer attitude toward ads” and “increases perceived intrusiveness” when compared to the Facebook wall (Belanche et al., 2019). Those case studies illustrate that Stories produce distinct practices from previous social media and deserve more investigation.
Notwithstanding, as a storytelling tool, Stories made an impact with scholars from narrative studies and visual studies. Ginette Verstraete noticed the transformation carried by
Stories on Snapchat from a messaging tool to social network and later to a storytelling platform (2016). Based on aesthetical analysis of selected Stories from the curated section Live Stories, Verstraete defends that the content is like “fast food: instant, globally transferrable, of poor quality, but also a sign of the immersive experience of the everyday, an affirmation of the pulse of time caught up in cycles of reproduction, consumption, information, and dissipation” (p. 113). Verstraete frames the user as an amateur caught in the “industry of (con)temporary appearance”, disempowered by the lack of interaction and by the impermanence: “what lasts is the environment of the interface and the metadata the brand has on us” (Verstraete, 2016, p. 113). It is exactly the evolution of the interface that is the focus of this research, however, I try not to make the distinction between amateur and professional by investigating what Stories afford to different types of users (including the platform).
Still in the field of narrative analysis and linguistics, Georgakopoulou has been addressing the relation between evolving affordances and story-making in short digital storytelling for more than a decade. In Georgakopoulou’s point of view, the “current designing spree of stories on apps” is one step in the digital storytelling transition from text-based to more audiovisual narratives which encourage users to share “not just one moment, but all moments of the day” (Georgakopoulou, 2017, p. 327). However, according to Georgakopoulou’s analysis of lexical and thematic associations, the discourse behind Stories produces mismatches between the marketing rhetoric and the actual affordances of the feature, which limits user control with the abundance of pre-selections, templates and menus:
The convergence and replication of story-facilities across apps suggests that drawing on templates to post stories will become further consolidated as a widely available mode of sharing everyday life, particularly for the main targeted groups of teenagers and young adults. The marketing of Stories already makes specific assumptions about what is story-worthy. In particular, template stories offered by the apps and how-to-guides are about sharing moments of having fun with friends. The features that enhance the stories’ plot involve adding weather, location, holidays, funny sunglasses, etc. Users are encouraged to create ‘goofy selves’ and to do ‘imperfect sharing’. (Georgakopoulou, 2019, p. 10)
Furthermore, Georgakopoulou sees the tendency of standardization and the continuous creation of new filters, stickers, and editing options directly aimed at “maximizing users’ attention economy within an app and the monetization and metricization of lives which capitalizes on this
attention” (Georgakopoulou, 2019, p. 10). Following Georgakopoulou, this study addresses the mismatches between discourse and affordances in a historical perspective.
Finally, in a book-length analysis of Instagram, Leaver et al. (2020) describe Stories as one of biggest drivers for Instagram growth in 2017, when the platform became the most popular “home” for Stories with more than 250 million daily active users. The media scholars argue that Instagram’s adaptations provided a balance between ephemeral communication and performativity, while opening Instagram to partnerships and bringing a deeper integration with third parties like music streaming platform Spotify and the animated GIFs repository Giphy (Leaver et al., 2020). Leaver et al. also mention that the normalization of vertical video in Instagram (and other platform) Stories led to Instagram’s excursion into television: “IGTV is just one more example of terrain Instagram has explored thanks to the Stories format” (Leaver et al., 2020). Yet, the space dedicated to discuss Stories in the book is limited by the period of writing and then publishing. As one of the authors acknowledges when questioned by email: “we do talk a bit about Stories, although not as much as we might if we were writing it right now”.
In sum, Stories are arguably shaping new practices in social media but have not emerged yet as a focus point of academic research. Just a few scholars gave Stories the relevance they have in the contemporary environment of social media apps; not much is known about how the feature was created and how it has evolved into a format currently used by millions with various purposes in different apps. This study intends to fill part of that gap by outlining the evolution of Stories’ across Snapchat and Instagram, bringing forward the negotiation of affordances between different types of users and the apps’ interests. By seeing Stories as a format developing over time, it is possible to perceive gradual changes, instead of seeing just a picture of what Stories are in the moment as previous studies did. Moreover, this research also contributes to app historiographies with an uncommon view over a feature that goes beyond the app where it originated.
3. Theoretical framework
3.1 Empirical app studies
Since the iPhone App Store opened in 2008, mobile apps have increased their relevance each year, becoming inserted into activities that had low levels of mediatization, like finding romantic partners or breathing. For a large part of these twelve years, apps were understudied by media scholars and their relevance minimized by the newness, abundancy, triviality of functions, and highly volatile environment (Morris & Murray, 2018). Furthermore, apps presented methodological challenges when turned into research objects. Frequency of updates, fleeting existence, and the mysterious processes that categorize, approve or ban an app from the store are just one of the hurdles identified by Morris & Murray (2018). To overcome those challenges, app studies encompass theories and methods from other fields related to mediatization, including software studies, social media and platform studies, design, business and computer science. This multidisciplinarity sets up a productive ground for research.
As Gerlitz et al. (2019) observe, it is possible to identify three main waves in app studies. First, communication and information studies highlighted the mobility of the new media and its outcomes regarding cultural and social practices. Then, apps are seen from the market perspective, incorporating studies that deal with monetization, commodification of data, mobile advertising, innovation and rankings. The most recent wave is part of the “infrastructural turn” in media studies. It brings to the front the relation of apps with hardware and other software-based infrastructures (Gerlitz et al., 2019). According to this framework, apps are contingent configurations of software that operate in relation to other infrastructures. However, contemporary app infrastructures are not only physical (e.g. internet cables, data centers, transmission antennas) but also made of layers of software which runs on top of another software. In this sense, an infrastructure is not only the material conditions for software operation but, in addition, apps and platforms can build up infrastructural properties by exercising economical and social power. Taking from Benjamin Bratton’s theory of a global computing architecture that organizes our lives (2015), empirical app studies frame apps as “a layer within a larger computing stack”, in which the layers are dependent on one another (Gerlitz et al., 2019).
This research engages with that last wave of empirical app studies in the sense that it uncovers how formats shape and are shaped by infrastructures, human and non-human actors,
and can become themselves an infrastructure. Here, following Bruno Latour’s definition, an actor is understood as any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference (Latour, 2005, p. 71). In line with the concept of affordances (see section 3.3), things are not deterministic and might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on (Latour, 2005, p. 72). On this matter, apps are things that are designed to interact and are progressively gaining significance, absorbing features and contributing to the mediatization of daily activities. As Stories take on communication and storytelling functions, they can be seen as an example of how software can turn into a digital infrastructure that operates in relation to other software and in relation to other physical infrastructures. One can see Stories as programming codes that build an interface embedded in an app. The app, in its turn, only “exists” when running on a smartphone which functions within a platform (e.g. Android, iOS). However, there is no use for Stories if the smartphone cannot connect to telecommunication infrastructures and cloud-based servers to transmit data. And this is just a part of the network of technologies necessary to produce and share a Story.
Those indispensable processes are mostly hidden from users and become visible only when they break up. Transparency and embeddedness are both elements of infrastructures as described by Bowker & Star (2000), but there are several others, such as spatial or temporal reach, existence in a community of practice which shapes and is shaped by the infrastructure and the embodiment of standards. Standardization appears as a key concept in Bowker & Star because when systems become infrastructures they often require a standard, which is “any set of agreed-upon rules for the production of (textual or material) objects” (p. 13). Besides that definition, Bowker & Star also outline other characteristics of standards: they span over more than one community of practice and persists over time, they are deployed in making things work together over distance and heterogeneous metrics, they can be difficult and expensive to change and they do not necessarily follow the adoption logic that the best standard “wins” – one may do so for various reasons, from better marketing to a “network effect”. While the relational aspect of apps seem to be in the forefront of empirical app studies, standardization processes are less visible in the field, notably in the context of communication and storytelling. In this sense, to investigate standardization across apps can reveal the benefits and constraints of formats in this new, fast-paced mobile environment.
3.2 Standards and formats
In regard to standardization, app studies can take advantage of format studies to understand how apps re-appropriate formats in their own medium-specific way. In a broader sense, a format describes "a coherent pattern of order and composition – a standardized template for the organization of space, time or information according to some rhythmical, structural, aesthetic or volumetric rules” (Jancovic et al., 2020). In media studies, formats have been embedded in discussions since the origins of the field. When Marshall McLuhan argues that the content of a medium is always another medium, he is considering “the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes” (McLuhan, 1964). He takes the railroad as an example: it did not introduce movement or transportation or the wheels, but it changed significantly how humans move and created new practices, new kinds of work and leisure. In the same way, cinema did not invent visual narratives but its effect is related to the form that the story is presented. In the early years of the moving image, the controversy about an ideal aspect ratio was a problem of format and involved not only filmmakers but also exhibitors, distributors, spectators and materials. It is possible to draw some parallels between the origins of cinema and mobile storytelling, as they arguably created new practices and set conventions for the possibilities of the media.
The shape or size of a movie, or any other media, is a common entry point for format studies (Volmar, 2019). One of the most well-known examples of how standardization processes are inherent to new media is the development of a standard aspect ratio for cinema. Namely, early photographers and cinematographers used different sizes of sensitive materials to capture images using light (Belton, 1990). The Lumiere brothers started with a 5:4 aspect ratio frame but later, for the sake of compatibility, followed Thomas Edison and W. K. L. Dickson suggestion that the frame should be the height of four perforations of a strip of 35 mm film, which would become one of the most durable standards in the history of the moving picture (Roberts, 1984). According to Belton (1990), the choice for the 4:3 aspect ratio “appears to have been determined by a complex interplay of technological, economic, and ideological factors”, while the popularization of the format was the “direct result of the monopolistic practices and business acumen of Edison and George Eastman”, who controlled the patents for the use of cameras and films, respectively (p. 656). Standards are constantly challenged by new formats, but their dominance depends on practical and economical aspects, instead of creative and aesthetic ones. Writing in 1996, engineer Mark Schubin “found no clear indication of a
preference for any particular aspect ratio for moving images nor any physiological reason to favor one over another” (p. 460). This understanding clashes with the common sense of a technological evolution towards a better quality of sensorial experience and signals the contingency of any standard or format.
Another opening wedge is narrative or processual-event formats, which are “strongly structured events that follow predefined sequences, rules, or schemes”, mostly related to the emergence of mass media in the 20th century (Volmar, 2019 p. 32). In TV studies, the term format has been used to designate formulas and concepts for shows, notably after the 1990s liberalization and deregulation of national television systems around the world (Waisboard, 2004). Popular shows like “Big Brother”, “Survivor”, and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” are developed by a company that sells the “script” to other broadcasters with small space for adaptations to the local culture – a dynamic called “glocalization”. As one program is already successful in some countries, it is likely to repeat the performance in other languages and contexts – a logic similar to the winner-takes-all effect in the technology market. As Markus Stauff (2020) remarks, what travels from one broadcaster to another are not fully recorded episodes but “practices, materials, and regulations that enable the generation and reconstruction of a number of versions”, what was considered a “cultural technology” by Albert Moran (p. 108). In this sense, formats travel long distances as organizational and technical rules to be followed by local producers, casts and spectators.
Although discussions about formats are around for at least a century, a format theory was suggested only recently after most media eventually became digital. As operating systems and, by consequence, software are based on different structures, digital formats assume the form of interoperational languages that inform how a file should be read and displayed for the user. And instead of lingering in the shadows of infrastructure, some formats moved to the front line of web culture. In “MP3: The Meaning of a Format” (2012), Jonathan Sterne traces the history of the digital audio format back to the development of the telephone to show how the “new medium” is entangled with a series of contingent practices that could have been developed in other ways, revealing the decision-making processes behind the standardization of a compression method that turned into a popular way of sharing and listening to music between the 1990s and the 2000s. By doing that, the concept of a medium with a fixed definition seems not enough to register multiple scales and time frames that had an effect on MP3. For Sterne (2012), thus, format theory “invites us to ask after the changing formations of media, the contexts of their reception, the conjunctures that shaped their sensual characteristics, and the
institutional politics in which they were enmeshed” (p. 11). In this regard, a format theory perspective pushes for a way of doing media history that goes “beneath, beyond, and behind the boxes our media comes in” (Sterne, 2012 p. 11) and maps social and political dynamics at the same time. Encoding and data formats, in this sense, are the third entry point for format studies.
A demarcation of format studies as a field within media studies is still in progress though. The book “Format Matters” (Jancovic et al., 2020), which followed a conference about formats at the University of Mainz in 2017, is a compilation of case studies from photography, film, radio, television and internet scholars, which also expand Sterne’s format theory to encompass aspects from the other fields, such as the narrative structures of TV formats, the size of the film frame, and social media affordances. Formats have an effect on how users perceive and handle media content, although, users also have an influence on how the media develops. On this subject, the collection highlights that formats are not developed by a centralizing mastermind: they are a result of practices, technological arrangements and negotiation processes that can be traced from modern printing rules for folding paper sheets to Twitter’s limitation of 140 characters. Twitter’s constraints can be seen as a processual format, in the sense that it governs the form of the discourse (Volmar, 2020). Curiously, Twitter’s 140 characters initially reflected SMS message capacity (McCraken, 2016) and had been slowly abolished – an example of how fast the technological continuation can be deleted in the digital media. According to Twitter, the 140 characters format was limiting users’ thoughts in languages like English, Spanish, and French, often making the user edit the tweet to make it fit and, consequently, having less time to tweet more frequently (Rosen & Ihara, 2017). That insight into how the format affects practices is only possible because almost all users’ routines within the app are datafied and fed back instantly to the developer – a dynamic which did not exist (or existed in a much smaller scale and slower frame) between editors and book readers.
On one hand, formats allow content to travel, be easily produced, repeated, understood and displayed (Jancovic et al. 2020). On the other, while providing the conditions for that, they also constrain and privilege modes of production, direct particular actions and forbid others. In this direction, formats legitimize a singular grammar that helps controlling and maintaining users inside its environment (Jancovic et al., 2020). Viewed in this way, format studies bring a comprehensive framework to follow standardization processes in apps through at least three entry points, namely the shapes and sizes of media content, the encoding and data formats,
and the narrative and processual-events that regulate how users interact with apps and with other users.
3.3 Affordances
Another of the many intersections between mediatization, format, and empirical app studies is the concept of affordances as a way to analyze material and technical features in order to understand how media can influence social and economical interactions. The term coined by psychologist James Gibson in 1979 originally intended to displace the subject-object dichotomy in visual perception. According to him, “any substance, any surface, any layout has some affordance for benefit or injury to someone” (Gibson, 2014, p. 131). An affordance is not property of the object, neither of the subject, or it is both as Gibson suggests, you can choose. The important factor is that affordance is relational “in both ways, to the environment and to the observer”. The concept was further developed within the fields of cognitive science and design by Donald Norman, who added the notion of “perceived affordance” as an element of the object that could steer or suggest to the user the correct way to use it (Norman, 1988). That notion related to the object is present in discursive interface analysis of web pages (Stanfill, 2015) as well as in the concept of “nudge” which discusses aspects of the choice architecture that can alter “people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives” (Thaler & Sunstein, 2009, p. 6). Along with this line, Davis and Chouinard (2016) propose that affordances vary by degree and suggest that artifacts allow, demand, request, refuse, encourage and discourage actions. In this study, affordances are seen as a relational concept, following Bucher and Helmond’s (2018) platform sensitive approach. For them, affordances not only “reflect the complex coevolution of users and environment” but also can be extended “beyond its own environment” and include human and non-human actors like algorithms. “Such a perspective enables us to see how platforms may afford different things to various types of users, including end-users, developers, and advertisers; and considers how they are connected through various possibilities for action” (Bucher & Helmond, 2017, p. 253). Thus, this research is concerned not only with what distinct users can do with Stories but also with what they afford to the platform.
On the macro-level, software affordances are designed according to what is called the “media logic”. This concept also cuts across the main fields of research associated with this study. For Hjarvard (2008), media logic “refers to the institutional and technological modus operandi of the media, including the ways in which media distribute material and symbolic
resources and operate with the help of formal and informal rules” (p. 13). Within software studies, the rise of app-centric media in opposition to Tim Berners-Lee’s “open” web is closely connected with segmentation and commoditization validated by a rhetoric of autonomy, empowerment, and independence for both the users and producers of apps in a way that naturalizes the centrality of commercial interests (Daubs & Manzerolle, 2016). Specifically in the social media context, the logic behind sharing stories relates to the affordances of browsers, search engines and platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram. According to van Dijck and Poell, the social media logic entangles principles of programmability (a two-way traffic between users and programmers of interfaces, protocols and algorithms), popularity (the set of mechanisms for “boosting popularity of people, things, or ideas, which is measured mostly in quantified terms”), connectivity (always mediated by the platform who defines how connections are taking shape, even if users themselves can exert considerable influence) and datafication (the capture of user information with the potential to develop techniques for predictive and real-time analytics). As van Dijck and Poell (2013) define:
Social media logic refers to the processes, principles, and practices through which these platforms process information, news, and communication, and more generally, how they channel social traffic. Like mass media, social media have the ability to transport their logic outside of the platforms that generate them, while their distinctive technological, discursive, economic, and organizational strategies tend to remain implicit or appear ‘natural’. (p. 5)
The dynamic negotiation between users, platforms, technology, and offline entities is never free of economic interest. The relationship between the economic and the social value is recognized in what Gerlitz and Helmond (2013) call the “like economy”, in which “social interaction is instantly metrified and multiplied and which connects insights from web analytics with individual user profiles and the social graph” (p. 1362). In the “like economy”, Facebook’s social buttons and plugins serve the principle of connectivity but also as tracking devices, which generate data that can be monetized. Even if services are provided for “free” by social media platforms, the users are somehow paying with their data or their attention, which is seen as a scarce commodity by attention economy theorists. The recent intensification in attention studies is a consequence of the exponential rise in the datafication of human interactions, which generates a large amount of data to be analyzed and used in order to produce the desired outcome with the help of algorithms, behavioral science and real-time experiments (Tufekci, 2014). For
Terranova (2012), this is what allowed the Internet to become an "economic medium" in which "all the axioms of market economics can once again be applied":
The fact the 'attentional assemblages' of digital media enable automated forms of measurement (as in 'clicks', 'downloads', 'likes', 'views', 'followers', and 'sharings' of digital objects) open it up to marketization and financialization (from the floating value of Internet companies to the accumulation of celebrity capital by means of a number of followers on Twitter to the changing value of 'clicks' as calculated by Google's software AdSense and AdWords). (p. 3)
Therefore, products (and persons) struggle to be attractive all the time in order to gain visibility and raise their value in a circular self-reinforcing dynamic: attention attracts attention. According to this logic, the affordances of social media apps are intertwined with the desire of retaining more attention, which can be achieved via media-specific features that can be measured and monetized. The attention environment rewards not only the app or platform but also its users who can evaluate the success of each post through likes, shares, views, etc., as well as adjust behavior to maximize efficiency according to the same media logic.
4. Methodology
As seen so far, investigating the evolution of Stories’ into a software format requires a multi-layered approach to take into account the agency of diverse human and non-human actors. Therefore, this research applies an experimental combination of empirical methods from app studies and the framework of format studies. The focus is on the developments made by Snapchat and Instagram from 2013 to April 2020. The former is responsible for creating Stories, and the latter made it more popular, expanded the features, and consolidated Stories as a format. A multi-layered approach has been proved effective to critically assess the history of social media platforms and its accelerated transformations in van Dijck (2013) and Burgess & Baym (2020). Although Stories are not exactly a social media platform or an app, they are embedded into a platform or an app, thus following the same logic because they are designed to be part of the same architecture. Nowadays, apps can be complex structures which deliver various services and connect different actors. To achieve their goals, several tools or features are combined together and contribute in specific ways to the principles of programmability, popularity, connectivity, and datafication, as discussed by van Dijck and Poell (2013). Stories are a major part of that architecture. In this regard, Stories presents themselves sometimes as a feature inside an app and sometimes as a platform, as described by Gillespie (2010; 2017) and by Nieborg and Poell (2018), with its own ecosystem of actors separate from the other features of the app, making the analysis of Stories more complex. This methodology presents three key layers: interface and technology, users practices and responses, and socio economic. Next, I operationalize this multi-layered approach as follows.
First, to examine the evolution of affordances over time, I collected materials from digital archives, companies blogs, news coverage and time-framed searches in Google Search and Google Images. With the assistance of the Internet Archive, a crowdsourced repository of past versions of URLs, it was possible to gather Snapchat and Instagram version numbers, descriptions, images of the interface and changelogs provided by the apps’ developers. Archived snapshots of the pages in the app store are a first entry point to investigate apps historically since they provide information about intended uses and reviews from users, where problems and errors rapidly arise. In total, the Internet Archive keeps 861 captures for Snapchat and 4.334 for Instagram’s details page in the Play Store (Android) since 2013. However, the Internet Archive is limited because the collection of captures do not represent every change on the details page. The archive does not collect the full history of changes of a URL, it does
snapshots only when users or robots visit the page. This method of archiving can spawn discrepancies. For instance, there are 32 captures of Snapchat’s Play Store page in January 2017 – most of them are the same page in different languages –, while there is not a single rendition of the page during the months of April, June, September, November and December of that same year. Moreover, the information about the apps is entered by the developers themselves, who use the space to highlight a new feature, making minor changes or deletions of a feature to go unremarked. For instance, when Snapchat expanded the group-sharing feature Live Stories, the update only described the changes as “improved video chat” and “bug fixes”. This is why app history requires looking also into companies blogs and into news coverage to get a better description of new and abandoned features.
According to Dieter et al. (2019), building on Light et al. (2016), the app interface is the most relevant way to research affordances and make inquiries about the expected use and the power relations. “Enquiries into interfaces can tell us not only about the apps but also about the expectations that those interfaces have of users and how certain ideas about users are designed into those apps” (Dieter et al. 2019, p. 4). In this sense, the walkthrough method (Light et al., 2016) is a well-known method to study apps that prescribes a user-centred route for direct engagement with the application’s interface and establishes the expected uses according to the company's vision, operating model and governance. However, the method lacks a historical dimension. Going through all the screens as a new user or looking into the operating model once provides only a picture of the current configuration of the app, which is not the purpose of this study. The challenge of doing a “historical walkthrough” with older versions of an app is an issue related to the next entry points for empirical app studies: app packages and connections.
The app packages are software bundles which are downloaded from the app stores directly to mobile devices. In order to save space, the previous packages are erased from the users’ device and from the app stores with every update. A path to find and run older versions of apps (packages) can be found on Helmond and van der Vlist (2020). Although they indicate alternative sources called app repositories, they also raise issues over incompleteness and concerns over software and legal security, which were confirmed in the initial process of this research. A search for Snapchat’s Android packages (APKs) in three repositories (Uptodown, AndroidAPKsBox and APKPure.AI) retrieved 885 versions in total. However, the distribution over time is unbalanced: 73% of the packages are from the latest version (10), which was first released in 2017, and another 22% consists of version 9 released in 2015, leaving only 5% for the earlier years. This restriction makes it difficult to really start the early days and years of
apps. Even when it is possible to find an older version, they are more difficult to work with since they require the use of emulators or developer environments. Four packages available for version 3 of Snapchat were tested without success in BlueStacks emulator and in Android Studio, which is the development environment for Google’s operating system. When trying to create a new account the app demanded an update to the latest version to proceed, and when trying to log in with an existing account the server returned an error. Two of the APKs could not be installed due to flaws in the packages. Trying to access the interface with older app packages requires high technical knowledge and time to test the files available, which makes this entry point not worthwhile for the purpose of this study. Instead, in order to analyze the evolution of affordances, this study employed a mode of “static walkthrough” (Dieter et al., 2019). This static walkthrough is not performed with the app running but through screenshots, videos, app data and descriptions about the features. A similar approach was adopted by Poulsen (2018) to perform a historical study of Instagram’s tools. When facing the same challenges to analyse apps over time, Poulsen collected screenshots of the user interface to examine the number of tools available, changes in the representation and semiotic functions of tools. As he claims, this method is more accessible to “recreate” data of older software (Poulsen, 2018), therefore, making it possible to look into the evolution of app interfaces and affordances.
Second, this research builds on what van Dijck (2013) defined as “articulated user responses”. They consist of reactions to changes in the user experience that can be found in “how-to” articles, blog posts, or social media content. User responses are particularly productive because they can reveal part of the negotiation over affordances between users and apps:
When looking at social media platforms developing over time, we can discern gradual changes in the presentation of content through the implementation of interface features. In their responses, users often comment on the pros and cons of these imposed changes, revealing value judgments and thus insights into the politics of cultural form. (van Dijck, 2013, p. 35)
Unusually, those responses cannot be found on Stories themselves because, if they ever existed, they are already gone. Therefore, most user responses come from blogs and other social media, principally Twitter. In several blog entries and news reports, tweets appear embedded as a way to show users’ reactions to changes in Stories. The microblogging platform was also a tool for the Snapchat team to know what their users were snapping about in the early years, while not even the owners had access to content that was circulating on the platform.
Third, to relate the evolution of affordances with the business model, I collected interviews with spokespersons, earnings reports, financial statements, fillings for initial public offers (IPOs) and transcriptions from investors' calls. Since both Snapchat and Instagram became public corporations, they are obliged to publish the financial statements and answer to investors' inquiries, which is a fertile source to understand the economical aspect of the platforms. Likewise, the books “How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story” (Gallagher, 2018) and “No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram” (Frier, 2020) were relevant sources for an insider point of view of the rationale adopted by founders and directors in the decision-making process.
The data collected recreates distinct perspectives on the affordances of Stories. The analysis is structured as a biography divided into two periods. From 2013 to 2016, Stories are being formatted in Snapchat. This is the longer part of the analysis since it intends to reveal the underlying aspects of its creation. From 2016 to 2020, Stories are being consolidated as a format with the adoption by Instagram, making it more popular and introducing new features. Each period is divided into three segments, following a simplified version of van Dijck’s (2013) critical approach to social media history. First, the technologic dimension entails descriptions of the interface and the relations with other data infrastructures, connecting the technological conditions for Stories with affordances. The second segment directs attention to the users and the cultural practices engendered by the technology, providing insights on the negotiation between users and developers that leads towards a format. Third, the socio-economic aspect looks into the business model, the aspects of governance and the ownership in order to unveil what Stories afford to the apps and the commercial dimension of a format.
5. Story of Stories
5.1 From communication to storytelling (2013-2016)
This section brings the technological developments that allowed the emergence of Stories as a storytelling format and highlights its reliance on physical and software infrastructures. The analysis of the affordances produces a general definition for Stories and guides the study of how the format impacts mobile storytelling. In this sense, Stories contrasts with other current social media and creates new practices, which are heavily influenced by the affordances and by Snapchat’s notion of good storytelling. Furthermore, in the last segment, Stories are seen as a fundamental part of Snapchat’s business model, enabling advertising revenue like the television model without the need to produce broadcasting.
Technology
Stories is a development of Snapchat’s ephemeral multimedia messaging service which started in 2011 (Snap Inc. News). Before Stories, Snapchat’s interface was simple and colourful and yet it already featured a distinguishing design that persists until today: the app launches directly on the smartphone camera. As it was supposed to be a tool to share what is happening at the moment, one could not upload an image taken outside the app’s camera, forcing the user to open the app to take the shot and immediately send it to a contact. The relationship between the app and the camera is crucial from the beginning, and later the company would define itself as a “camera company”. Snapchat has never built a camera but relies on more than half a century of technological developments on digital image sensors, particularly improvements made by Eric Fossum on complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) that allowed “low-cost visual communications and multimedia applications” (Fossum, 1997, p. 137). The “camera-on-a-chip”, as he called it, made cameras sufficiently small and light to be installed in mobile phones, which in its turn comes from over a century of negotiations around communication technologies over electric wire and over the air (Lasen, 2005).
Stories is a software designed for smartphones, so it is conditioned by the design of mobile devices, which is profoundly impacted by the iPhone launch in 2007. Apple’s take on the design of mobile devices became the industry standard for at least a decade. However, as the acceptance and naturalization of the smartphone happened so fast, most users hardly ever think of that. “The initial iPhone differed from traditional mobile phones in having a large
touchscreen for viewing video and the Web, a browser based on personal computer standards rather than rewritten for mobile, a custom user interface with intuitive panning and zooming designed specifically for that touchscreen, and no physical keyboard or keypad” (West & Mace, 2010, p. 275). The materiality of the iPhone, how it is held and how it feels has an effect on how the camera is used and how applications are developed to run on mobile device’s operating systems. Needless to say, the existence of smartphones is feasible because of several technological advancements, mostly because of the exponential growth of processors’ computing capacity over the last decades. This assemblage of networks, hardware, software, and camera is the basic structure where Snapchat built its ephemeral multimedia service first for iPhones.
Snapchat started as a private messaging service, an important fact to understand where Stories come from. After opening the app, the user can take a picture by pressing the screen over the “shutter” button. Immediately, a preview of the image appears and it is possible to choose for how long (from one to ten seconds, with default time being three seconds) it would be displayed for the receiver by tapping a clock on the bottom left. Then, by tapping “Send”, the user can choose the receiver from an expandable list of contacts that Snapchat retrieves from the device. What is sent to the receiver via mobile networks and servers (as stated in 2017, Snapchat relies on Google’s platform infrastructure for computing, storage, and bandwidth) is a binary version of the image captured by the sensor and compressed with the JPG method, resulting in a JFIF file for transmission. The receiver’s device stores the file in a temporary folder, waiting for the user to open the app. A pink closed box with a number on top on the bottom left of the app's initial screen indicated the user had received images, which were called “Snaps” within the app. It was required to press and hold a text message to view the image for the time selected by the sender, who received a notification when the snap was opened. After that, the image was automatically deleted from the device and from the server.
In the first half of 2012, the app had around 100,000 daily active users with just one version for iPhones. While working on improvements and bug fixes, Snapchat’s team of developers were also creating a version for devices running on Google software, which operated on 25% of the mobile phone market, while Apple’s iOS retained 24%, according to Statista. On 29 October, Snapchat launched the Android version with a similar look but fewer features. Reviews on the Google Play Store pointed out that there was no tool to add text captions like in the iOS version, forcing users to “write” text with the drawing tool, which was one of the first “creative tools”. And on 14 December, Snapchat added a major feature only for
iPhone users: video messages. The same update landed on the Google Play store only two months later
The support for video messages depended on the expansion of 4G LTE wireless infrastructures, which had just started to roll out in developed countries, increasing bandwidth capacity to transmit larger packages of data wirelessly (Ballve, 2012). Before 4G LTE, it was possible to send and watch videos only in low quality and not without hiccups. As videos require considerably larger bandwidth and storage, they are encoded in the MPEG format, which is also a way to compress audio, video, and graphics material into one file – a standard that had been in development for over a decade (Battista et al., 2000). However, Snapchat’s innovation consists of a graphical user interface designed around the same “shutter” button for taking pictures and video: the user could tap for a photo or tap and hold to record a video. Although several apps supported photo and video, until Snapchat, there were different modes of capture that had to be selected before pressing the “shutter”. “Problematically, a user must determine the optimal mode for recording a given moment before the moment has occurred. Moreover, the time required to toggle between different media settings often results in a user failing to capture an experience” (Spiegel & Murphy, 2013). An inheritance from the historical separation between photographic and moving image devices, the ontological distinction between the two modes is almost erased in Snapchat’s invention patented “single mode visual media capture”: it is while capturing that the software decides which type of media to store according to a time threshold for pressing the “shutter” button. Interchangeable photos and videos are also in the core of Stories.
The launch of Stories is the first time that an update is available for iOS and Android at the same time – the lag between the two platforms, however, continued after Stories, always with a predilection for Apple’s operating system. According to Gallagher (2018), what Snapchat’s users desired most was an additional feature to send group snaps without having to combine through the contacts list. By then, other social media networks were structured around a “feed” or “timeline” with an algorithmic order like Facebook or in reverse chronological order, meaning that the latest updates are shown first like Twitter (a change to algorithmic sorting was carried out in 2018). One user could share an image once to be seen by all (or most) contacts, while on Snapchat the user had to tap each contact or group of contacts to send the same image or video. On 3 October 2013, Snapchat users who updated the app received a message that would change that. At the very top of the contacts list, the message from “Team Snapchat” was different from the regular snaps because it mixed photos and videos seamlessly in a longer
linear sequence. “Your Story always plays forward, because it makes sense to share moments in the order you experience them”, Snapchat explained in a blog post. The chronological order’s importance is indicated by a second patent that describes how users view content in Stories, more specifically, when a user comes back to another user’s profile, the application shows only Stories that have not been shown yet (Spiegel, 2014).
Fig. 2: Snapchat interface in October 2013 with the addition of Stories (Source: Snapchat)
To create a Story, the user had to follow the same procedure to take a photo or video with the app but the preview included a discreet Story icon: a double-rectangle with a star on the bottom (Fig. 2). When choosing to add to “My Story”, a pop-up explained that by doing so your friends could view the snap an unlimited number of times for 24 hours and that it was possible to change who could view your story on the settings. Evan Spiegel, co-founder of Snapchat, had brainstormed while in college about an app called “24 Hour Photo”, after the stores that take one day to develop film photography (Frier, 2020). The arbitrary 24 hours time frame of Stories, thus, can be seen as a tribute, or rather a continuation of a characteristic expressed in a different media, like compact discs having almost the same diameter of a cassette (Immink, 1998). Beside the time frame, direct messages and Stories differ also by the number of times they can be viewed and the audience selection: Snaps are one-to-one exchanges, while Stories are one-to-many. Every time a contact added a Story, he or she would jump to the top of the
contact list with a circular thumbnail working like a preview. To watch a Story, the user had to press and hold the friend’s name like a snap and, then, videos and photos appeared in a chronological sequence which allowed the constructions of a narrative without the need of video editing software. Each photo or video has a maximum length of ten seconds; the narrative is built by adding one after another. The ability to easily combine audiovisual messages into a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and quickly share it with multiple contacts only with a smartphone and network connection was a game-changer for digital storytelling.
Before Stories, mobile devices have been seen as useful tools for creating and sharing audiovisual stories but “designing editor interfaces that support creation of rich audio-visual presentations has been a major challenge” (Jokela et al., 2008). The Mobile Multimedia Presentation Editor developed by the Nokia Research Center (Jokela et al., 2008) and the Mobile Digital Storytelling interface (Reitmaier and Marsden, 2009) are two examples of mobile multimedia editors which still resemble professional video-editing software that may be difficult to use, particularly for novice or casual computer users (Fig. 3). In non-linear editor software, in which both examples build on, the story assembling occurs after all the action has already happened.
Fig. 3: Mobile Digital Storytelling storyline interface from Reitmaier and Marsden (2009)
The “editor” can choose which images will make the “cut”, rearrange the order of the images, and add text captions, voice over and other editing features to support the narrative. In this sense, Stories are an evolution of early digital storytelling tools that already saw potential to enable accessible storytelling from one user to a selected audience via blogs, podcasts, short-range communication technologies and private messages (Jokela et al., 2008). The
novelty of Stories is that adding images to the “cut” (supposedly) happens while the action is ongoing and the narrative is built along with the action. Instead of sharing one story with the day’s highlights, Stories encourage sharing several pieces along the day. It recontextualizes social media posting of photos and videos to a narrative. More than a photographer or a videographer, the user is also an editor who hardly notices that they are creating a narrative which is consumed in the order intended by the editor. Regarding the technological aspect, Stories can be generally defined, then, as a specific graphical user interface designed for production and sharing of audiovisual content through mobile devices and a method for consumption of the same content in the social media context.
Users and practices
Inside Snapchat, the discussion about how to go from a private communication to a social media app took around one year. The launch was preceded by two blog posts from Nathan Jurgenson, Snapchat’s social researcher, who signalled that impermanence would still be the core of Snapchat’s version of a feed. On 19 July, he argued for an experiment on temporary social media against the documentation and metricization of everything:
Social media is young, and I hope it grows out of this assumed permanence of our data. A corrective, an injection of ephemerality, is badly needed and overdue. The present doesn’t always need to be owned, held still and fixed; sometimes it might be best left alone to simply be what it is, letting more moments pass not undocumented and unshared, but just without enforced documentary boxes and categories with corresponding metrics filed away in growing databases. (Jurgenson, 2013a)
Jurgenson’s second blog post for Snapchat, on 20 September, brought concepts from Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid modernity to the community of “snappers”. Again, he criticized the current social media platforms for transforming life into permanent archives formed of quantifiable pieces and its consequences to the notion of fluid identity (Jurgenson, 2013b). Both texts show a vocabulary and a thoughtfulness that contrasted with the fun and short updates Spiegel and the Snapchat team have been posting until then, which could be one more attempt to state that the app was more than a sexting tool. By then, the multimedia messaging app had around 40 million daily active users (Statista) but Spiegel had to minimize the sexting affordance in almost every public appearance (Wortham, 2013; Kelly, 2013). Stories helped to bury that framing, without eliminating the sexting affordance.
Stories were announced in a blog post with three commercial video clips featuring bands who appeared to be recording a video for a new song while sharing videos and photos with captions and drawings with the new feature. The videos ended with a double-entendre phrase: “It’s about time”. When Stories first appeared on Snapchat, only a few technology-focused media outlets and blogs considered it news-worthy. Stories were first seen as a departure from disappearing messages to something more permanent, although for only 24 hours. Ellis Hamburger, who joined the Snapchat team one year later, wrote for The Verge: “Snapchat may not look much like Facebook, but with Stories, the company is taking its first steps toward competing with Facebook’s most important product: News Feed” (Hamburger, 2013). However, there were no comments, likes, reverse order or algorithmic sorting. The idea was to keep encouraging users to share the moment and without much curation. As a recompensation mechanism, there is a list of everyone who viewed your Story; furthermore, the direct conversations sparked by Stories can also be considered a recompensation that is part of phatic communication promoted by the app.
Stories offered new possibilities and more exposure than the private 10-second long snaps. Yet, they were not a very popular feature from the beginning: less than 10 million from 350 million snaps sent every day were added to Stories. The fact that Stories are more perennial than snaps was contradictory to the way users engaged with the app until then. As Boyd’s notes, the “snaps” countdown until disappearing highlights the ephemerality and demands attention. Many users “choose not to open a Snap the moment they get it because they want to wait for the moment when they can appreciate whatever is behind that closed door” (Boyd, 2014). Some users considered the process of tapping each contact or group of contacts to send the same image or video a singularity that added importance to the messages. For example, artist Shaun McBride, one of the early Snapchat stars, did not mind spending forty-five minutes to choose every follower name and send them his new drawing: “I like knowing that if I receive a snap, that person took the time to specifically add me. If there was a ‘select all,’ we would have people sending pictures of their food to hundreds of their friends everyday with one click of a button” (Weissman, 2014). Stories required new modes of interaction which did not present those aspects from private snaps. Furthermore, even though there are no links or ads, it was already seen by the media as a step to future monetization: “A timeline is a core component of any app that wants to turn social activity into marketing revenue opportunities, or at least it has been thus far. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all allow users to post content that
