How to Watch Instagram Stories Without Being a Creep
Those bubbles at the top of your feed play by different rules than static posts
In the four years since Instagram launched Stories, the video clips that display as small bubbles atop users’ feeds have become extremely popular. In January 2019, 500 million people posted or viewed Instagram Stories daily, up 66% from 2017, (Snapchat, by comparison, averaged 202 million daily users in 2019.)
Despite this popularity, the rules of how to properly use Instagram Stories are still up for debate.
Instagram Stories are fleeting, vanishing within 24 hours, à la Snapchat, and are generally posted with the expectation that they are captured and uploaded in the moment, without first being FaceTuned or Photoshopped. “As people are more aware that Instagram pictures were staged, there was a tension,” explains David Craig, a media professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and author of Social Media Entertainment: The New Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Stories, he says, show that someone is spontaneous and communicative, helping them nurture the relationship between themselves and their communities. When Swedish communications researcher Marina Amâncio interviewed Instagram Story users, Sofia, a…
