I analyzed an Instagram story I posted on January 1st. It was a picture of a cake with “Happy New Year’s” written in icing. The picture was not taken through the Instagram camera feature, but rather taken through the default iPhone camera with the best positioned one shared online. I took creative liberties in zooming in on the picture to remove unwanted objects and adding subtle filters to adjust coloring and overall aesthetic.
The overall message is to wish my online connections a Happy New Year in a way that comes across as organic — unlike a typed out message — but conveys that I am engaging in some form of celebration on this day. The main form of engagement was ‘hearts’, presumably from people flipping through many Instagram stories, but wanting to quickly return the wish. Only a handful of viewers (mainly long distance connections) engaged through a message reply. Though I constructed the story carefully, I wished for it to come across candid and ephemeral — and how my followers chose to engage reflected that. It was only viewed by a third of them, while even less of a percentage chose to engage in some form.
Barnea et al. posits that “unrestricted content can freely watch it again later to collect additional information or verify their comprehension, viewers of ephemeral content must sufficiently process it the first time around” (752). This might help to explain why some viewers might choose to like a story rather than comment. A heart can take place for any positive response a viewer has without requiring direct engagement or comprehension of the content. One person might have seen simply a cake and liked it which becomes a safe way to engage without having to conjure up a well-thought out response.
Based on my experience on Instagram, permanent posts will receive more comments within 24 hours then a story, yet I don’t imagine that users spend more time comprehending a timeline post then a story. Though we know that a viewer can rewatch a story multiples time in the 24 hour period as well as view it for as long as they’d like in a given moment, Barnea et al. found that ephemerality affects viewers’ use of cognitive resources, regardless of whether time pressure was present or not (762). This leads me to question how ephemeral content and time-pressure affects the way audiences choose to engage with the content through social media. In vein of Barnea et al. 's finding, it might be that users become passive when watching a story so engagement becomes inherently different to when they consume other forms of content, even without time-pressure.
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