[Ads-l] New sense of "story"

dave@wilton.net dave at WILTON.NET
Tue Jul 2 16:59:32 UTC 2024


Apologies if this has been covered here before, but I've just become cognizant (in that I knew it existed but didn't think of it as linguistically significant) of a relatively new (i.e., a little more than a decade old) sense of "story," that of a curated, often automatically curated by an algorithm or AI, ephemeral series of personal pictures and videos on a particular subject, theme, or time period.
 
It got it's start with "Snapchat Stories" back in 2013:
 
"Snapchat Launches Stories, 12-Hour Photo and Video Sharing." FierceMobileContent, 3 October 2013. ProQuest Trade Journal.
 
"Snapchat is expanding beyond its signature here-and-gone media sharing philosophy with the introduction of Stories, a new timeline feature enabling users to compile photos and videos that may be viewed an unlimited number of times over a 24-hour period.
 
"Snapchat enables users to capture images (a.k.a. "snaps") and clips with their smartphone, overlay a text message and transmit the image to friends. In the past, content was available to the recipient for a pre-determined viewing period between just one and 10 seconds, and then permanently deleted from both smartphones and from Snapchat's servers. Stories lends some permanence to the Snapchat experience."
 
Instagram added a "stories" feature a couple of years later. Now my Android phone has started automatically generating "stories" from my cached photos and videos and setting them to cheesy music for me to view and post should I choose to do so. The word has gone from the name of a trademarkable feature on a specific product to generic noun for a whole class.
 

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