Verbatim
Navneet Alang at Real Life on what was lost as Twitter’s original ambient intimacy gave way to apocalyptic hellscape, and the subtle but profound shifts that take place as that intimacy now quietly hides out on the ephemeral plane of the Snapchat or Instagram story. Despite the oftentimes cantankerous tone of this newsletter, we’d rather be searching for these hideouts than dwelling on, lamenting, and dissecting the hellscape, as fun as that can be.
There is little point in attempting to catalogue the billions of minutes of content that people put into stories. Much of it is of a particular sort, though: minutiae of the day, food and drink, time at the gym or on public transit, wry visual jokes. Like tweets, stories are also a solitary unit, but one that only makes sense in terms of a broader feed. In the aggregate, they form a constellational arrangement of the social, a kind of horizon peppered with a vague awareness of what the people we follow are up to. Flipping through them, especially on Instagram where they flow from one into the other, feels a bit like switching through cameras in a hotel, seated in a security room you weren’t really supposed to have access to.
For the perpetually lonely, this intimacy carries a particular significance. Ambient intimacy can only be ambient when it straddles a once-clearer line between private and public, the compulsion to watch arising out of the very act of blurring the division between the two. And in the collapse of the boundary, the everyday, visual dimension of the story can act as a kind of proxy for a lack of daily intimacy.
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