Notes on Stories

I read an interesting article the other day by Ian Bogost entitled "Why 'Stories' Took Over Your Smartphone" about the rise of a brand new native mobile media format.

Formats are important because they are essentially behavioral defaults. They pre-define what is possible. They also standardize what, until a particular format arose, had been a totally bespoke effort based on a growing number of individuals producing something that looks similar using, potentially, vastly different means.

It's a great read, but for those who don't have time I cribbed some key passages from the article that highlight the salient points, at least for me.

So, skim through my notes below and give the article a read if you have more time.
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Facebook’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, made a remarkable announcement...this week: “The increase in the Stories format,” he explained, “is on a path to surpass feeds as the primary way people share things with their friends sometime next year.”

[Stories are] a collection of images and short videos, with optional overlays and effects, that a user can add to over time, but which disappears after 24 hours. Users view a Story in sequence, either waiting out a programmed delay between images or manually advancing to the next.

Stories might be the first true smartphone media format. And that might mean that they will become the dominant format of the future.

[Stories are] composed in the heretofore ghastly 9:16 aspect ratio. This is an unholy view, like a widescreen television on its side. But it’s also the standard view of the smartphone display. 

Stories is not a technology, nor is it a feature. It is a media format, or even a genre, in the way that a magazine or a murder mystery or a 30-minute television program is.

[Stories] are chains of vignettes, as seen through the frame of the smartphone’s rectangle. Moving rectangles, maybe we should call them instead, after moving images, another name for the category that contains film, television, video, and the like.

“I think disassociation is sort of the point [of Stories]...It’s the same reason people go to Coachella just to take photos of themselves there all day.” The liveness of smartphone-authorship, combined with the ephemerality of the Story format, makes it a catalog of the experience of holding and looking through a rectangle almost all the time.

“Photography is not about the thing photographed...It is about how that thing looks photographed.” And likewise, a Story is not about the things sequenced in the story. It is about how those things look through the sensors and software of a smartphone.