The Elongated Present
Constantly, curious new users open up platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest to serve as micro-moment escapes from their daily grind. And though social media has up to now often been called an “immediate gratification,” the escape onto Facebook’s Timeline or through a portal of one of Pinterest’s pinboards is often one that leads not to the immediate present but instead leads, immediately, to the past.
One reason that Instagram achieved incredible success is that it neatly and effortlessly commoditizes the most accessible abettors of our memories. It helps users overlay meaning to the banal snapshots of today by effortlessly evoking earlier eras. (Or effortlessly elongating the present: The very concept and importance of memory shifts when you know that the artifacts of tomorrow’s anniversary dinner will look just like it’s 1979.)
We know the faded colors of past photographs are important, because they exist, in real life, in real photo books. And we transfer some of that weight to these Instagram images too, well before their zeros and ones even dry.
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