“
I think i should get love inked on my skin.
Maybe that's the only way i am destined to keep it.
”
”
Anjum Choudhary
“
It took thirty-eight years before 50 million people gained access to radios. It took television thirteen years to earn an audience that size. It took Instagram a year and a half.
”
”
Gary Vaynerchuk (Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy World)
“
Words fail to describe
what i feel anymore.
Let me be numb for a while,
let me be sore.
”
”
Anjum Choudhary
“
He was her reason for existence,
She was his ultimate risk.
”
”
Anjum Choudhary
“
I have loved this world in ways
it could never love me back.
”
”
Anjum Choudhary
“
Love left us long back,
we just got better.
You at pretending,
Me at hiding.
”
”
Anjum Choudhary
“
My mind gets stronger everyday,
my heart gets weaker with time.
”
”
Anjum Choudhary
“
Some of us cover to protect our bodies
some of us cover to protect our souls
in both cases,
respect their choices.
”
”
Anjum Choudhary
“
The more you give up who you are to be liked by other people, it’s a formula for chipping away at your soul. You become a product of what everyone else wants, and not who you’re supposed to be.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
I've spent a life chasing stories to tell when I'm old.
”
”
Atticus Poetry
“
If it stays, then it is love. If it ends, it's a love story.
”
”
Nichomachus
“
Don't focus on the words i write,
pay attention to the ones i don't.
These lines won't tell you much about me,
try to read in between these lines.
”
”
Anjum Choudhary
“
There were plenty of fishes in the pond,
yet i fell in love with a crocodile.
”
”
Anjum Choudhary
“
A filter on Instagram was like if Twitter had a button to make you more clever.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
I feel like girls who drink whisky tell good stories.
”
”
Atticus Poetry
“
In the age of Facebook and Instagram you can observe this myth-making process more clearly than ever before, because some of it has been outsourced from the mind to the computer. It is fascinating and terrifying to behold people who spend countless hours constructing and embellishing a perfect self online, becoming attached to their own creation, and mistaking it for the truth about themselves.20 That’s how a family holiday fraught with traffic jams, petty squabbles and tense silences becomes a collection of beautiful panoramas, perfect dinners and smiling faces; 99 per cent of what we experience never becomes part of the story of the self.
It is particularly noteworthy that our fantasy self tends to be very visual, whereas our actual experiences are corporeal. In the fantasy, you observe a scene in your mind’s eye or on the computer screen. You see yourself standing on a tropical beach, the blue sea behind you, a big smile on your face, one hand holding a cocktail, the other arm around your lover’s waist. Paradise. What the picture does not show is the annoying fly that bites your leg, the cramped feeling in your stomach from eating that rotten fish soup, the tension in your jaw as you fake a big smile, and the ugly fight the happy couple had five minutes ago. If we could only feel what the people in the photos felt while taking them!
Hence if you really want to understand yourself, you should not identify with your Facebook account or with the inner story of the self. Instead, you should observe the actual flow of body and mind. You will see thoughts, emotions and desires appear and disappear without much reason and without any command from you, just as different winds blow from this or that direction and mess up your hair. And just as you are not the winds, so also you are not the jumble of thoughts, emotions and desires you experience, and you are certainly not the sanitised story you tell about them with hindsight.
You experience all of them, but you don’t control them, you don’t own them, and you are not them. People ask ‘Who am I?’ and expect to be told a story. The first thing you need to know about yourself, is that you are not a story.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
I am a dreamer,
neither lost or found.
Waiting for a story
worth dreaming, forever.
”
”
Ventum
“
Don’t be scared to change the prince’s name in your story.
”
”
Atticus Poetry
“
More important was the lesson that just because something is more technically complex doesn’t mean it’s better.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
More than 200 million of Instagram's users have more than 50,000 followers, the level at which they can make a living wage by posting on behalf of brands.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
People who don't take risks work for people who do.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
Instagram posts would be art, and art was a form of commentary on life. The app would give people the gift of expression, but also escapism.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
A quote is the essence of a story. We all need stories to convey ideas, justice, anger, humanity, hope, laughter, learning, and whatever makes us understand or feel understood
”
”
Gloria Steinem (The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off!: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Rebellion)
“
Everything breaks at a billion.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
just because something is more technically complex doesn’t mean it’s better.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
Sad eyes, once had happy stories to tell.
”
”
Ventum
“
Come close - let our hearts beat like one,
we'll be the two that became one.
Love is the rhythm of our night.
”
”
J.WOLF
“
leadership philosophy: to ask first what problem they were solving, and then to try and solve it in the simplest way possible.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
Vulnerability now gets better engagement, because it’s more relatable.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
The fear of missing out. It’s the affliction that drives obsessive checking of Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, Instagram stories, WhatsApp groups, and news apps.
”
”
Jason Fried (It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work)
“
Gabriel photographed each dish to post on his Instagram story, while lamenting that his friends were so obsessed with sharing their lives, he wasn't sure if they were actually living them.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
On social media, the average user is scrolling passively, wanting to be entertained and updated on the latest. They are therefore even more susceptible to suggestion by the companies, and by the professional users on a platform who tailor their behavior to what works well on the site.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
Instagram’s early popularity was less about the technology and more about the psychology—about how it made people feel. The filters made reality look like art. And then, in cataloging that art, people would start to think about their lives differently, and themselves differently, and their place in society differently.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
The way to get filthy rich is by aggressively copying others and then adding your own twist. Facebook very publicly copied Snapchat. When Snapchat released Snapchat Stories, Facebook rolled out Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories.
”
”
Nathan Latka (How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital: The Four Rules You Must Break To Get Rich)
“
I wouldn’t be able to write about this for my blog or instagram stories. Not anytime soon at least. Not while it was still so raw. It hurt. And nobody wanted unvarnished pain omg their feed unless it was served up with a side dish of uplift or some kind of lesson.
”
”
Jennifer Weiner (Big Summer)
“
I approached it with an intensity that burned brighter than me waiting for Britney Spears to post something on her Instagram story. Anything: a picture of corn, a runway walk, a picture of her in the gym where you can see her collection of tiny furniture—I live for it all.
”
”
Adam Rippon (Beautiful on the Outside)
“
No one had any inkling that behind all the magazine features and Instagram stories of the glamorous Greshams—luxuriating in couture at their swoon-worthy manor, glistening with golden tans aboard their antique black-sailed yacht in the Ionian Sea—rose a gargantuan mountain of debt.
”
”
Kevin Kwan (Lies & Weddings)
“
But that, right there, is why embracing our dirty dessert secrets matters so much. On the surface, they are just hilarious indulgences, but dig down a little deeper than the whipped cream and cherry on top and you'll see that they are powerful reminders to cultivate and celebrate our inner selves as fiercely as we do our LinkedIn profiles and Instagram feeds. Because what good, really, is all that public success and admiration without the private joy at the center?
”
”
Christina Tosi (Dessert Can Save the World: Stories, Secrets, and Recipes for a Stubbornly Joyful Existence)
“
It used to be that the internet reflected humanity, but now humanity is reflecting the internet.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
Great stories are not the ones which have great
people in them.
Great stories are the ones which have ordinary
people, willing to do great things.
”
”
Priyanka singh (Death before Cremation)
“
People live inside the stories they tell themselves. Others see about you the things that you believe.
”
”
C.D. Bell (Chimera (Weregirl #2))
“
Follow your dreams, they know the way. Let your own story come out. Put something wonderful in the world that wasn't there before.
”
”
-Unknown Nina Dobrev's Instagram
“
The world would have become Jannat if Instagram users would have followed 10% of what they propagate in reels and stories.
”
”
Mujahid Mughal
“
Once Facebook purchased the VPN company, they could look at all the traffic flowing through the service and extrapolate data from it.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
Life gave me its hand,
and I grasped it.
We’d wasted too many years
being estranged.
”
”
Bhuwan Thapaliya
“
Like any system, it can be gamed. And Instagram ended up fueling a problem not just about truth in advertising, but about truth in life.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
Our story is the kind that sets emotions on fire
”
”
J.WOLF
“
We can reframe and recast our lives -- not with lies, not with deceptions, but with the truth of who we are and of who we are choosing to become.
”
”
Sandra Marinella (The Story You Need to Tell: Writing to Heal from Trauma, Illness, or Loss)
“
The world is getting noisier. We've gone from boomboxes to Walkmen to portable CD players to iPods to any song we want, whenever we want it. We've gone from the four television channels of my childhood to the seeming infinity of cable and streaming. As technology moves us faster and faster through time and space, it seems to feel like story is getting pushed out of the way, I mean, literally pushed out of the narrative. But even as our engagement with stories change, or the trappings around it morph from book to audio to Instagram to Snapchat, we must remember our finger beneath the words. Remember that story, regardless of the format, has always taken us to places we never thought we'd go, introduced us to people we never thought we'd meet and shown us worlds that we might have missed. So as technology keeps moving faster and faster, I am good with something slower. My finger beneath the words has led me to a life of writing books for people of all ages, books meant to be read slowly, to be savored.
”
”
Jacqueline Woodson
“
Did they choose to go to one party over another because it would look better on Instagram? Did they decide to read a story just so they could tweet about it? Have we all become so desperate to share everything that we’ve stopped enjoying our lives?
”
”
Lucy Sykes (The Knockoff)
“
The apps start out with seemingly simple motivations, as entertainment that could lead to a business: Facebook is for connecting with friends and family, YouTube is for watching videos, Twitter is for sharing what’s happening now, and Instagram is for sharing visual moments. And then, as they enmesh themselves in everyday life, the rewards systems of their products, fueled by the companies’ own attempts to measure their success, have a deeper impact on how people behave than any branding or marketing could ever achieve.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
Facebook was like a constant high school reunion, with everyone catching up their acquaintances on the life milestones that had happened since they’d last talked. Instagram was like a constant first date, with everyone putting the best version of their lives on display.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
Facebook automatically catalogued every tiny action from its users, not just their comments and clicks but the words they typed and did not send, the posts they hovered over while scrolling and did not click, and the people's names they searched and did not befriend. They could use that data, for instance, to figure out who your closest friends were, defining the strength of the relationship with a constantly changing number between 0 and 1 they called a "friend coefficient". The people rated closest to 1 would always be at the top of your news feed.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
Democrats need to catch up and leapfrog ahead. And this isn’t just about data. We need an “always-on” content distribution network that can match what the right-wing has built. That means an array of loosely connected Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, Twitter feeds, Snapchat stories, and Reddit communities churning out memes, graphics, and videos. More sophisticated data collection and analysis can support and feed this network. I’m no expert in these matters, but I know enough to understand that most people get their news from screens, so we have to be there 24/7.
”
”
Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
“
And they would avoid posting anything that perpetuated some of the new unhealthy trends on the app. They would never post a photo of anybody near a cliff, no matter how beautiful, because they knew that gaining a following on Instagram was becoming so desirable that people were risking their lives for perfect shots.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
In the age of Facebook and Instagram you can observe this myth-making process more clearly than ever before, because some of it has been outsourced from the mind to the computer. It is fascinating and terrifying to behold people spending countless hours constructing and embellishing a perfect self online, becoming attached to their own creation, and mistaking it for the truth about themselves.20 That’s how a family holiday fraught with traffic jams, petty squabbles, and tense silences becomes a collection of beautiful panoramas, perfect dinners, and smiling faces; 99 percent of what we experience never becomes part of the story of the self.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
No child is an island. They come from families. They are the newest braids in that cord of humanity, and it is right and beautiful that they should know something of what their parents and grandparents value, while at the same time having access to the classic works of human imagination that we all own in common. Contemporary culture will take care of itself. It's lively and loud and most children's lives are full of it. When parents read long-beloved classics with them and share stories that convey what we want them to know about the world, we can help them discover powerful narratives and pictures they will never find on PBS Kids or Instagram.
”
”
Meghan Cox Gurdon (The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction)
“
Research made famous by Kent Berridge at the University of Michigan shows that dopamine is released when something new and potentially useful triggers the brain. We often think dopamine is the stuff of pleasure, but Berridge’s research shows that dopamine is related to pleasure, but not pleasure itself. It’s a chemical message that says, “Give me more!” And it’s activated by sex, many drugs, chocolate, and novelty. The buzz of the phone in your pocket, wondering if it’s good news or bad, the endless potential of what you could learn from the next Instagram story you swipe through, triggers dopamine release in a way similar to methamphetamine and lust. This, as I’m sure you have noticed, is very distracting.
”
”
Jedidiah Jenkins (Like Streams to the Ocean: Notes on Ego, Love, and the Things That Make Us Who We Are: Essaysc)
“
victory, he told me that I deserved the credit for what had happened. He said that by giving my testimony, I’d freed myself and probably also helped other people in unfair conservatorships. After having my father take credit for everything I did for so long, it meant everything to have this man tell me that I’d made the difference in my own life. And now, finally, it was my own life. Being controlled made me so angry on behalf of anyone who doesn’t have the right to determine their own fate. “I’m just grateful, honestly, for each day… I’m not here to be a victim,” I said on Instagram after the conservatorship was terminated. “I lived with victims my whole life as a child. That’s why I got out of my house. And worked for twenty years and worked my ass off… Hopefully, my story will make an impact and make some changes in the corrupt system.
”
”
Britney Spears (The Woman in Me)
“
There were absolutely amazing photographs everywhere, on everyone's Facebook page and everyone's iPhone and Instagram, just floating around in cyberspace for eternity. People took hundreds and thousands of digital pictures; one or two, even twenty or a hundred, were bound to be great. All anyone had to do was click through them all and post the ones they liked, deleting the rest. But using film meant you never knew what was going to be a good picture, let alone a great one, until you were standing there looking at a contact sheet with a magnifying glass and deciding which to print.
Maybe nobody cared anymore, but then again, writers probably felt the same way when word processors were invented. Anyone with a story and a keyboard could write their memoir now, write the great American novel, or tweet a 140-character trope that gets retweeted and it read by hundreds of people every hour of every day.
”
”
Nora Raleigh Baskin (Subway Love)
“
At one point in 2015, a few Instagrammers in Barnieh's crowd in Hong Kong took the game to another level: they made a habit of hanging off the side of buildings and the tops of bridges. In one shot by Lucian Yock Lam, @yock7, a man is holding another man's arm while he dangles from the side of a skyscraper at night, hovering above a busy street. The caption is a simple hashtag: #followmebro. It got 2,550 likes, a fleeting reward for putting one's life at risk.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
Everyone at the company had access to the whole Facebook code base and was allowed to make changes to the product without much oversight. All they needed to prove was that their edit caused a boost, however small, for some important metric, like time spent on the app. That allowed engineers and designers to work a lot faster, because there was less arguing about why or whether they should build something. Everyone knew that their next raise would hinge on whether they affected growth and sharing. They weren’t held accountable for much else.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
She longed for the days when everyone’s eyes weren’t glued to a small screen; when you walked into an elevator and smiled at a stranger, or had a conversation with a cabdriver; when your dinner companion didn’t spend the meal art-directing an Instagram shoot of the peony centerpiece. Imogen sometimes wondered if people weren’t letting social media dictate their entire lives. Did they choose to go to one party over another because it would look better on Instagram? Did they decide to read a story just so they could tweet about it? Have we all become so desperate to share everything that we’ve stopped enjoying our lives?
”
”
Lucy Sykes (The Knockoff)
“
God was dead: to begin with.
And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead. Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead.
Love was dead.
Death was dead.
A great many things were dead.
Some, though, weren’t, or weren’t dead yet.
Life wasn’t yet dead. Revolution wasn’t dead. Racial equality wasn’t dead. Hatred wasn’t dead.
But the computer? Dead. TV? Dead. Radio? Dead. Mobiles were dead. Batteries were dead. Marriages were dead, sex lives were dead, conversation was dead. Leaves were dead. Flowers were dead, dead in their water.
Imagine being haunted by the ghosts of all these dead things. Imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower. No, imagine being haunted (if there were such a thing as being haunted, rather than just neurosis or psychosis) by the ghost (if there were such a thing as ghosts, rather than just imagination) of a flower.
Ghosts themselves weren’t dead, not exactly. Instead, the following questions came up:
“are ghosts dead
are ghosts dead or alive
are ghosts deadly”
but in any case forget ghosts, put them out of your mind because this isn’t a ghost story, though it’s the dead of winter when it happens, a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas Eve morning (Christmas, too, dead), and it’s about real things really happening in the real world involving real people in real time on the real earth (uh huh, earth, also dead):
”
”
Ali Smith (Winter (Seasonal, #2))
“
One of Zuckerberg’s least favorite criticisms of Facebook was that it created ideological echo chambers, in which people only engaged with the ideas they wanted to hear. Facebook had already funded research,12 in 2015, to show echo chambers were mathematically not their fault. With the social network, everyone had the potential to engage with whatever kinds of ideas they wanted to, and tended to have at least some Facebook connections with people who held different political opinions. But if people chose not to interact with those they disagreed with, was that really Facebook’s doing? Their algorithm was just showing people what they demonstrated, through their own behavior, they wanted to see, enhancing their existing preferences.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
They will make time to take some photos for Instagram, but will struggle to crack a smile as they think about all the work still to be done. They will drop barbed remarks about the weekend’s hitches, without proposing any solutions. They will drink at lunchtime, doze off in the sun, and wake up feeling foggy and sluggish, with a pounding head and too much to do. But then they will receive notifications of the first reviews, and all that weight will instantly lift. Three will have come in, all of them giving five stars. One will be by a woman with over three hundred thousand followers, who will have tagged them in a post praising, as per their agreement, the relaxed but impeccable welcome, the choice of natural wines, the simple, elegant decor—Mediterranean and yet unmistakably international. It’s all completely perfect, the story will say. It’s just like it is in the pictures.
”
”
Vincenzo Latronico (Perfection)
“
Systrom and Krieger didn’t want any of this to be on Instagram and knew, as the site got bigger, that they wouldn’t be able to comb through everything to delete the worst stuff manually. After just nine months, the app already hosted 150 million photos, with users posting 15 photos per second. So they brainstormed a way to automatically detect the worst content and prevent it from going up, to preserve Instagram’s fledgling brand. “Don’t do that!” Zollman said. “If we start proactively reviewing content, we are legally liable for all of it. If anyone found out, we’d have to personally review every piece of content before it goes up, which is impossible.” She was right. According to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, nobody who provided an “interactive computer service” was considered the “publisher or speaker” of the information, legally speaking, unless they exerted editorial control before that content was posted. The 1996 law was Congress’s attempt to regulate pornographic material on the Internet, but was also crucial to protecting internet companies from legal liability for things like defamation.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
Mosseri’s answer to the important question was perfect by Facebook standards: “Technology isn’t good or bad—it just is,” he wrote. “Social media is a great amplifier. We need to do all we can responsibly to magnify the good and address the bad.”
But nothing “just is,” especially Instagram. Instagram isn’t designed to be a neutral technology, like electricity or computer code. It’s an intentionally crafted experience, with an impact on its users that is not inevitable, but is the product of a series of choices by its makers about how to shape behavior. Instagram trained its users on likes and follows, but that wasn’t enough to create the emotional attachment users have to the product today. They also thought about their users as individuals, through the careful curation of an editorial strategy, and partnerships with top accounts. Instagram’s team is expert at amplifying “the good.”
When it comes to addressing “the bad,” though, employees are concerned the app is thinking in terms of numbers, not people. Facebook’s top argument against a breakup is that its “family of apps” evolution will be better for users’ safety. “If you want to prevent interference in elections, if you want to reduce[…]
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
Cue thousands of Instagram posts encouraging the no-contact rule and implicitly shaming anyone who continues a relationship with their ex. But the story of relationships and their endings is far too complex for us to apply solution-focused changes aimed at reducing pain. Still, every one of my friends and every therapist on Instagram advises against talking to an ex. No contact, cold turkey, zero—a crazy idea to me. In my work, I’ve noticed that more than half of my clients will continue to communicate with their former partner, maintaining some form of connection. Even a friendship. This happens despite the discouraging advice recommending a complete cutoff. But we, as a society, might be better off trying to understand our need to continue a connection with an ex than condemning or strongly advising against it. Maybe it’s time we reconsidered our attitude toward post-breakup connections. Instead of dismissing them as unhealthy, we could try to understand the motives behind our choice to stay in touch. After all, each relationship and breakup is unique, and the two (or more) people involved in a ruptured relationship are in the best position to judge what serves their emotional needs and personal growth. The idea of cutting an ex out of your life completely is also extremely heteronormative. Many queer people (like me) don’t have their family of origin to fall back on. Our “families” are therefore sometimes our friends, partners, and ex-partners, the people we form deep connections with. Alex was my family for ten years. So, for me, cutting him out of my life entirely wasn’t so simple.
”
”
Todd Baratz (How to Love Someone Without Losing Your Mind: Forget the Fairy Tale and Get Real)
“
They kept in touch for years and years. Momma believed in the goodness of people and she believed in the prayer of protection, that wherever she was, God was, too. Mom had a way of taking people under her wing and making you feel special when you were talking to her. Your story mattered. And whenever she thought I was getting a little too full of myself, she’d remind me: “Robin, your story is no more important than anybody else’s story. When you strut, you stumble.” Meaning: When you think that you’re all that and a bag of chips, you’re gonna fall flat on your face. Thank you, Momma, for that invaluable lesson. We were overwhelmed with the outpouring of love for our mother. President and Michelle Obama sent a beautiful flower arrangement to our house. It was the first time I had seen Mom’s grandchildren smile in days. It was a proud moment for them. The president of the United States. They asked if they could take pictures of the flowers and Instagram them to their friends. It was painful to make the final arrangements for Mom. The owners of the Bradford-O’Keefe Funeral Home were incredibly kind and gentle. Our families have known each other for decades, and they also handled my father’s homegoing service. Mom had always said she wanted to be laid to rest in a simple pine box. We were discussing what to put on her tombstone. I had been quiet up to that point, just numb. Mom and Dad were both gone. I was left with such an empty feeling. Grandma Sally had passed when Mom was in her seventies, and I remember Mom saying she now felt like an orphan. I thought that was strange. But now I knew exactly what Mom meant. There was a lot of chatter about what words to use on Mom’s tombstone. I whispered it should simply read: A CHILD OF GOD. Everyone agreed.
”
”
Robin Roberts (Everybody's Got Something)
“
She tilts her head to the side after taking a sip of her tea, studying us. “You know, I can’t get over how beautiful you two are together. One of those couples you love to follow on Instagram, you know, the really cute ones that are so sickening in love that you can’t get enough of them.”
Way to drop the love bomb, Mom.
Jesus.
Thankfully Emory doesn’t show any kind of hatred for the term but instead says, “Like Jennifer Lopez and A-Rod?”
“Yes,” my mom answers with excitement. “Oh my gosh, I’m obsessed with watching their stories. The little videos they do together, I just can’t get enough of them. J-Rod,” my mom says dreamily. “Oh gosh, what would your couple name be?” She thinks about it for a second. “Emox . . . or Knemory. Oh I love Knemory. Sounds so poetic.”
“Knemory does have a nice ring to it,” I add.
“I don’t know, what about Emorox?”
“Ohhh, that sounds like a name that belongs in The Game of Thrones.” Taking on a more masculine voice, my mom says, “Look out, Jon, Emorox is coming over the hill, with her fire-spitting dragons, Knemory and George.”
“George?” Emory laughs out loud, covering her mouth. “Why George?”
“Well, look at the names they have in that show? They’re all exotic names you’ve never heard before—Cersei, Gregor, Arya—and then in waltzes good old Jon Snow. It’s only fair that the dragons have a lemon in the bunch as well.”
“Uh, Jon is anything but a lemon, Mom,” I defend. “He was raised from the dead.”
My mom’s mouth drops, pure and utter shock in her face. “Jon Snow dies?”
Shit.
Emory elbows my stomach. “Where the hell is your GOT etiquette? You never talk about the facts of the show until the air is cleared about how far someone is in watching. You are one of those people who spoils everything for someone just catching up to the trend.”
*Ahem*
“I mean . . . uh . . . he doesn’t die.”
“You just said he is raised from the dead,” my mom says.
Feeling guilty, I reply, “Well, at least he’s still alive, right?”
She slumps against the cushion of the couch and mutters, “Unbelievable.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Gentry, that your son is a barbarian and broke your GOT trust.”
Pressing her hand against her forehead, my mom says, “You know, I blame myself. I thought I taught him a shred of decorum, I guess not.”
“Don’t blame yourself,” Emory coos. “You did everything right. It comes down to the hooligans he hangs out with. There’s only so much you can control after they leave the nest.”
“You’re absolutely right,” my mom agrees and leans across the couch to smack me in the back of the head.
“Hey,” I complain while rubbing the sore spot. I look between the two women in my life and I say, “I don’t like this ganging up on me shit.”
“You wanted us to get along, right?” Emory asks. “Well, I happen to like your mom, especially since she complimented my bosom.”
“Ah, I see.” I continue to look between the two of them. “You’re okay with my mom catching you with your shirt off now, moved past the embarrassment?”
Emory’s eyes narrow. “With that kind of attitude, it might be the very last time you see me topless.”
My mom raises her fist to the air, as if to say, “Girl Power.” And then she says, “You tell him, Emory. Don’t let him push you around.”
“I wasn’t pushing her around—”
“You keep that beautiful bosom under lock and key, and if you have a temptation to show anyone, just flash me.”
“Mom, do you realize how wrong that is?”
“Want to go to the bathroom right now, Mrs. Gentry?”
“I would be delighted to.”
They both stand but before they can make a move, I pull on Emory’s hand, bringing her back down to my lap. “No way in hell is that happening. Jesus, what is wrong with you?
”
”
Meghan Quinn (The Locker Room (The Brentwood Boys, #1))
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Mark Haddon
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For years I found it annoying to walk my dog. All she ever wanted to do was sniff the grass and trees upon which other dogs had left their scent. Neither of us got much exercise. It was like tug-of-war to get Snickers to move at all. One day, I saw an Instagram video in which a self-designated dog expert explained that dogs might need the sniffing more than the walking. Their brains light up when they sniff, and it can tire them out when they engage in vigorous sniffing. I had noticed how happy Snickers looked when sniffing, but my brain couldn’t connect the dots because sniffing dog urine sounds inherently unpleasant to my human brain. But to the dog, it was the equivalent of checking her social media. I started naming the trees and shrubs in the park accordingly: Muta (formerly known as Facebark), Twigger, LeafedIn, Instabush, and Treemail. Obviously, the garbage receptacle into which people flung their dog poop bags was TikTok. Once I understood the importance of sniffing, I reframed my experience this way. Usual Frame: Taking the dog for a walk and failing. Reframe: Taking the dog for a sniff and succeeding. That reframe completely changed my subjective experience. Instead of failing at walking, I was succeeding at being a sniff-assistant. Snickers loved the new arrangement, and sure enough, twenty minutes of outdoor sniffing set her attitude right for the rest of the day. But then I had a new problem. Standing around holding a leash is boring compared to walking. It’s boring compared to most things. But then I reframed my boredom this way. Usual Frame: I have nothing to do. I am just standing here. Reframe: Perfect time to practice proper breathing and posture. Now I spend twenty minutes a day enjoying the outdoors while breathing properly and practicing my posture. It feels good, which is enough to lock in the new habit. Now I am delighted to take my dog to the park. The only thing that changed was how I thought about the point of it all. If you’re like most people, you spend a lot of time standing in line or waiting for one thing or another. It feels like a gigantic waste of time. Maybe you check your phone, but that probably isn’t as useful as it is anxiety-making. As you can tell from the Snickers story, I found a way to turn all mindless waiting time into one of the most productive parts of my day using the good-time-to-breathe reframe.
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”
Scott Adams (Reframe Your Brain: The User Interface for Happiness and Success (The Scott Adams Success Series))
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While pulling clean drafts together took thousands of hours of work, the stories had all but revealed themselves. Facebook had allowed human trafficking to take place in the Persian Gulf on its platform as long as it occurred through brick-and-mortar businesses. In trying to improve the platform and boost user numbers, it had actually made the site, and the people who used it, angrier. Mental health researchers had concluded “we make body issues worse” and that Instagram was a toxic place for many teen girls, in particular. We divided up the stories among ourselves. Georgia Wells began interviewing young women who had developed eating disorders or body image issues of the sort that Instagram’s researchers worried their product might aggravate. The story she led would cite company documents that found “comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves,” citing research that found 32 percent of teen girls said that “when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.
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Jeff Horwitz (Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets)
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For a story on Facebook’s failings in developing countries, Newley Purnell and Justin Scheck found a woman who had been trafficked from Kenya to Saudi Arabia, and they were looking into the role Facebook had played in recruiting hit men for Mexican drug lords. That story would reveal that Facebook had failed to effectively shut down the presence of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel on Facebook and Instagram, allowing it to repeatedly post photos of extreme gore, including severed hands and beheadings. Looking into how the platform encouraged anger, Keach Hagey relied on documents showing that political parties in Poland had complained to Facebook that the changes it had made around engagement made them embrace more negative positions. The documents didn’t name the parties; she was trying to figure out which ones. Deepa Seetharaman was working to understand how Facebook’s vaunted AI managed to take down such a tiny percentage—a low single-digit percent, according to the documents Haugen had given me—of hate speech on the platform, including constant failures to identify first-person shooting videos and racist rants.
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Jeff Horwitz (Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets)
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Uma pesquisadora inglesa especialista no tema, Kate Atkin, lista a seguinte fórmula para lidar com esse problema: • Fale sobre o assunto e o que sente. Logo perceberá que não está sozinho e que boa parte das pessoas sente o mesmo que você (e foi por isso que a Paula propôs aqueles stories no Instagram); • Reconheça o seu sucesso e não atribua o que conquista à sorte ou ao trabalho duro. Sem o seu talento e habilidade, você não alcançaria os mesmos resultados; • Entenda que ninguém é perfeito e aceite que você vai fracassar em algum momento. Não use o fracasso como um reflexo de quem você é, apenas aprenda com ele; • Pare de se comparar com os outros, compare-se consigo mesmo para perceber a sua evolução ao longo do tempo. Eu ainda acrescentaria outros dois pontos nessa lista: 1. Permita-se pedir ajuda! Além da ideia da perfeição nata para o desenvolvimento de uma habilidade, em muitos momentos existe a concepção
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Marcelo Pimenta (Economia da Paixão: Como ganhar dinheiro e viver mais e melhor fazendo o que ama (Portuguese Edition))
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ON WOMEN DOMINATING INFLUENCER MARKETING AND INSTAGRAM CREATING UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS . . . I think women are social creatures and form strong relationships and connections much easier than men, so it’s natural that we dominate social media. I definitely think Instagram can create unrealistic expectations. I have had comments and DMs from followers telling me how my content makes them feel depressed or inadequate. So you know what I do now? I post lots of Insta stories and Facebook posts, usually unedited, about what really goes on in my life. This way, they see the prep that goes into that other Instagram post they saw, including the giant mess that is my office, the team that helps me out, and the 3 A.M. late nights.
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Brittany Hennessy (Influencer: Building Your Personal Brand in the Age of Social Media)
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Rudyard Kipling once wrote, “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.
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Jason Heiber (Instagram Stories: The Secret ATM in Your Pocket - Financial Freedom Between Your Thumbs)
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With respect to space and time, books are like a wall of resistance against a world that demands everything we have to give.
Reading a book allows you to travel through space and time to other places, to see the world from other perspectives and walk in another’s shoes for a bit. Stories create possibilities for our limited vantages to be cracked open, affording new views and different experiences.
Reading forces us to slow down. In the fast paced world we live, time is accelerating and we feel we have less of it. Our focus shifts second by second. We flip through our friends’ updates on Facebook or Instagram, quickly to get the story. We get impatient when a song or a movie takes too long to download. We read on our devices, take a pause and check our email, check our texts. Our concentration is spent in bursts and the sense of chaos builds.
And we are in a time of chaos. Each one of us can feel it. The pressure and the speed often feel relentless.
”
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Thatcher Wine (For the Love of Books: Designing and Curating a Home Library)
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The iPhone untethered the internet from the desktop. The energy of the blogosphere was redirected toward faster, mobile mediums. Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram facilitated the transition to mobile. These sites had learned from Facebook’s streamlined profiles and easy feeds. But they diverged from Facebook’s friend-focused model, favoring an open network that allowed users to “follow” anyone they found interesting. This mirrored the subscriber-based model of YouTube as well as the open architecture of the blogosphere. Instead of trying to re-create real-world friend networks online, this new generation of social apps sought to build an audience of friends and strangers alike. At the same time, they took the lessons of the blog era—chiefly, that anyone could build a following online—and expanded upon them.
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Taylor Lorenz (Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet)
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I would watch an Instagram story
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Olivia Muenter (Such a Bad Influence)
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Anybody can build Instagram the app,” he said, “but not everybody can build Instagram the community.” Those artists, designers, and photographers were turning into evangelists for the product, and Instagram needed to keep them as excited as possible for as long as possible.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
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Facebook automatically cataloged every tiny action from its users, not just their comments and clicks but the words they typed and did not send, the posts they hovered over while scrolling and did not click, and the people’s names they searched and did not befriend.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
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Systrom and Krieger, on the other hand, were awarded life-changing sums. Krieger solidly owned 10 percent and Systrom 40 percent, and so netted an estimated $100 million and $400 million, respectively, per the original deal price.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
This Journey Is Only 1% Finished,” the posters around campus declared. “The Riskiest Thing Is to Take No Risks.” “Done Is Better than Perfect.” “Move Fast and Break Things.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
The DJ congratulated them on the acquisition and lamented that he didn’t have the username he wanted. Jessica Zollman set him up with @Deadmau5 right there at the table.
”
”
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
Making money, in Zuckerberg’s opinion, is something to try only once a network is strong enough, so valuable to its users that advertisements or other efforts aren’t going to turn them off.
”
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Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
Today, Facebook is still the most dominant social network in the world, with more than 2.8 billion users across several social and messaging apps, and the primary driver of its revenue growth is Instagram. Analysts would later say that approving the acquisition was the greatest regulatory failure of the decade.10 Even Chris Hughes, one of the cofounders of Facebook, would in 2019 call for the deal to be undone. “Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American,”11 he wrote in the New York Times.
”
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Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
Waterworth believed that Instagram Reels would struggle to emulate TikTok’s dynamism. ‘You can’t copy the creative spirit that is at the heart of our community, and so we feel really confident and excited about where TikTok is going, and other people can focus on whatever they want to do.
”
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Chris Stokel-Walker (TikTok Boom: The Inside Story of the World's Favourite App)
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The Instagram versus Hipstamatic story is perhaps the canonical example of a strategy made famous by Chris Dixon’s 2015 essay “Come for the tool, stay for the network.” Chris writes: A popular strategy for bootstrapping networks is what I like to call “come for the tool, stay for the network.” The idea is to initially attract users with a single-player tool and then, over time, get them to participate in a network. The tool helps get to initial critical mass. The network creates the long term value for users, and defensibility for the company.40 There are many other examples across many sectors beyond photo apps: The Google Suite provides stand-alone tools for people to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, but also network features around collaborative editing, and comments. Games like Minecraft or even classics like Street Fighter can be played in single-player mode where you play against the computer, or multiplayer mode where you play with friends. Yelp started out effectively as a directory tool for people to look up local businesses, showing addresses and phone numbers, but the network eventually built out the database of photos and reviews. LinkedIn started as a tool to put your resume online, but encouraged you to build up your professional network over time. “Come for the tool, stay for the network” circumvents the Cold Start Problem and makes it easier to launch into an entire network—with PR, paid marketing, influencers, sales, or any number of tried-and-true channels. It minimizes the size requirement of an atomic network and in turn makes it easy to take on an entire network. Whether it’s photo-sharing apps or restaurant directories, in the framework of the Cold Start Theory, this strategy can be visualized. In effect, a tool can be used to “prop up” the value of the network effects curve when the network is small.
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Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
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Facebook was indeed biased, not against conservatives, but in favor of showing people whatever would encourage them to spend more time on the social network
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Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
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But as Facebook became a destination for political conversations, the human curation in “Trending Topics” wasn’t the actual problem. It was how human nature was manipulated by Facebook’s algorithm, and how Facebook looked away, that got the company in trouble.
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Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
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News organizations had been designing more clickable headlines ever since the social network became key to their distribution. But those news organizations were getting beaten by these new players, who had come up with an easier, more lucrative way to go viral—by making up stories that played on Americans’ hopes and fears, and therefore winning via the Facebook algorithm.
”
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Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
In the internal paper, the employee explained that Trump had outspent Clinton between June and November, paying Facebook $44 million compared to her $28 million. And, with Facebook’s guidance, his campaign had operated like a tech company, rapidly testing ads using Facebook’s software until they found the perfect messaging for various audiences. Trump’s campaign had a total of 5.9 million different versions of his ads, compared to Clinton’s 66,000, in a way that “better leveraged Facebook’s ability to optimize for outcomes,” the employee said. Most of Trump’s ads asked people to perform an action, like donating or signing up for a list, making it easier for a computer to measure success or failure. Those ads also helped him collect email addresses. Emails were crucial, because Facebook had a tool called Lookalike Audience. When Trump or any advertiser presented a set of emails, Facebook’s software could find more people who thought similarly to the members of the set, based on their behavior and interests. Clinton’s ads, on the other hand, weren’t about getting email addresses. They tended to promote her brand and philosophy.5 Her return on investment would be harder for Facebook’s system to measure and improve through software. Her campaign also barely used the Lookalike tool.
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Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
Obama knew from U.S. intelligence, but didn’t say to Zuckerberg at the time, that some of the incendiary news wasn’t coming from shady media entrepreneurs. One of the country’s biggest adversaries was running a pro-Trump Facebook campaign too.
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Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
With the social network, everyone had the potential to engage with whatever kinds of ideas they wanted to, and tended to have at least some Facebook connections with people who held different political opinions. But if people chose not to interact with those they disagreed with, was that really Facebook’s doing? Their algorithm was just showing people what they demonstrated, through their own behavior, they wanted to see, enhancing their existing preferences.
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Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
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It was better to start with something minimalist, and then let priorities reveal themselves as users ran into trouble.
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Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
Krieger did build a re-share button but never released it to the public. The founders thought it would violate the expectations you had when you followed someone. You followed them because you wanted to see what they saw and experienced and created. Not someone else.
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Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)