Part 1 – Social Media Storytelling Is Having an Identity Crisis

Ariel Aarenau

Dec 6, 2022 (published January 27, 2023) · 3 min read

I believe it would be wise to start off this series of posts by stating for the record that I am both a shareholder of Meta and, more importantly, have long been taken with the company’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I am fascinated by the company, formerly known as Facebook, as well as its founding. I fundamentally believe that it has changed social media forever and has made storytelling a pervasive phenomenon.

Since its humble beginnings in Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room, Instagram and Twitter have joined the big blue app as dominant players in social media storytelling. Prior to TikTok, no traditionally defined social media app had as wide an impact on the North American market as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Snapchat came close with its “stories” feature, but Instagram’s adoption of that storytelling method won people over and led to Snapchat remaining as a largely peer-to-peer messaging app rather than traditional social media. This is unlike YouTube, which is more closely aligned with a streaming platform than a social media app.

Simply put, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have each spent over a decade as the unencumbered market leaders in social media storytelling – that is, until recently with the unparalleled rise of TikTok and emerging growth of BeReal.

Over the last 12, 16, and 18 years, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, respectively, have led successful social media storytelling companies with products that have gone through massive evolutions. These transformations aimed at fending off competition have, as of late, come under major scrutiny from users. One cannot understate the magnitude of the ongoing reckoning of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Facebook’s parent company is down over 70% year to date, Elon Musk is looking to “save” Twitter (Waters & Murphy, 2022), and Instagram’s lead executive is responding to backlash from users claiming the app “sucks” (Lopatto, 2022). Recently, influencers Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner highlighted this with a viral post where they called on Instagram to revert its latest round of product changes, specifically calling on the app to “stop trying to be TikTok” (Paul, 2022).

As content creators like the Kardashians can attest, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are well known in the industry for their constant adoption of new features introduced by nascent, smaller social media apps. It is my belief that these product evolutions have boiled over and are what has led to the rise of platforms like TikTok and BeReal. The question this series aims to explore is whether the evolution of mainstream social media apps into everything platforms has led to an identity crisis in social media storytelling.

It is my belief that these platforms lost their unique storytelling capabilities as they grew into catch-all services. In a world where the “medium is the message,” (McLuhan & Fiore, 1976) creators continue to seek mediums that allow them to effectively leverage the unique affordances found within a given platform. After a decade of social media supremacy, TikTok has successfully delivered on that and is filling a void in storytelling left by the mainstream social media players.

Over the course of this series, I will spotlight how Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter once afforded users with a form of unique, constraint-driven storytelling now found within TikTok and BeReal. I will delve into each platform’s history and articulate how these platforms’ desire to be everything platforms turned them into nothing platforms. Finally, you will hear from two fellow BMPD students – Lea, a rising TikTok content creator, and Alicia, an avid BeReal user – as I work to pinpoint what specifically these platforms provide that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter no longer do.

Ariel Aarenau is in his final year of the Bachelor of Media Production and Design program at Carleton University where he is also minoring in Business. The fusion of digital media, design thinking, and innovative business technologies combines both his strengths and passions. He currently works at Deloitte as a Business Analyst focusing on digital strategy, innovation, and transformation advisory projects. Prior to joining Deloitte, Ariel held roles in Multimedia Services at the House of Commons of Canada, Marketing and Business Development for Deloitte Israel, and the Digitally Assisted Storytelling division of Carleton Immersive Media Studio.

References

Paul, L. (2022, July 26). Instagram caves and walks back changes after Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner called for app to stop copying TikTok. Rolling Stone. Retrieved October 27, 2022, from https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/kim-kardashian-kylie-jenner-want-instagram-to-stop-copying-tiktok-1388110/

McLuhan, M., & Fiore, Q. (1967). The medium is the massage. New York, Bantam Books.

Waters, R., & Murphy, H. (2022, April 16). Elon Musk fails to convince the doubters that he will ‘save’ twitter. Financial Times. Retrieved October 27, 2022, from https://www.ft.com/content/bdaa0a37-9f4f-4bcc-8f3a-ca9261186e8c

Lopatto, E. (2022, July 26). Adam Mosseri confirms it: Instagram is over. The Verge. Retrieved October 27, 2022, from https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/26/23279815/instagram-feed-kardashians-criticism-fuck-it-im-out

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