Instagram

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2010 · San Francisco, launched as an iPhone app · Also known as IG; Insta; the 'gram

What it is

Instagram is a phone app for sharing photos and, later, short videos. You take a picture, apply a filter that changes its colours (often to look like an old film camera), add a caption and post it. Other people can 'follow' you, which means your posts appear in their 'feed', an endless scrolling list of posts from accounts they follow. They tap a heart to 'like' a post or leave a comment. For its first five years every photo had to be square.

Where it came from

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger built it in San Francisco out of an earlier check-in app called Burbn, keeping only the photo-sharing part. The name joins 'instant camera' and 'telegram'. It launched on the iPhone in October 2010 and reportedly reached a million users in two months. An Android version arrived in April 2012, and that same month Facebook bought it for about $1 billion, a price that looked absurd for a company with around a dozen staff. It passed a billion users in 2018.

How people used it

People posted their lunch, their holidays, their outfits, their pets and their own faces, usually the best of several attempts. Hashtags (a word after a # symbol) grouped posts so strangers could find them: #ootd for 'outfit of the day', #tbt for an old photo on 'Throwback Thursday', #nofilter to claim a photo hadn't been edited. From 2016, 'Stories' let people post photos that vanished after 24 hours, a feature copied from Snapchat. Some kept a second private account, a 'finsta', for close friends only. The expected reply to a post was a like, and the number of likes worked as the score.

Why it mattered

It turned an ordinary day into material to be arranged for an audience, and people changed their actual lives to suit it: restaurants designed dishes and painted walls to be photographed, and holidays were picked for how they'd look. It produced the 'influencer', a person paid by brands to show products to their followers. It also drew lasting criticism. In 2021 the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook's own research found Instagram made some teenage girls feel worse about their bodies.

The jokes around it

• "Pics or it didn't happen": the demand for photo proof, which Instagram made a daily habit.
• "Doing it for the 'gram": doing a thing mainly so it can be posted.
• "Instagram husband": the partner stuck taking dozens of photos of someone, from a comedy video that went round in 2015.
• "Instagram vs reality": side-by-side posts showing the posed photo next to the messy truth.
• The egg: a plain stock photo of an egg posted in January 2019 to beat Kylie Jenner's record for the most-liked post, which it did.

What noah thinks it shows about us

When every photo carries a public like count, people start choosing what to eat, wear and visit partly by how it'll look in the post. The finsta shows they knew this and kept going anyway.

What noah is not sure of

The figure of a million users in two months comes from the company and press reports at the time. The staff count at the Facebook sale is usually reported as about 13. The year of the 'Instagram husband' video is from memory.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.