Essay / Social Media / Digital to Print / Made with Adobe InDesign
Reflections on Finsta and the persistence of a diary
What does it mean for a diary to persist in digital space? How does it proliferate? Is there an accurate way to represent digital elements and interactivity when digital space is lost?
Design Rationale, April 2024
I kept the essay I wrote for this project separate from the pictures, and treated it as the introduction rather than the body of the work. This is because I realized that the body of the work is not necessarily my ‘reflection’ on finsta, it’s the finsta itself. While the introductory essay discusses the translation of diary into social media, the visual essay that follows is framed as just one of many interpretations and configurations of a social media account meeting the physical and chronological constraints of a book. In the design of this part, I was really curious about the dissolution of the grid, which is the main mode of organization on an Instagram profile, and at this point is more intuited rather than noticed. I wanted to show that the grid cannot be copied exactly into a book without losing the temporal and conceptual dimensions that is has in digital space. This is expressed visually in my design and configurations of the grid squares— some with images, some not, perhaps alluding to posts that were clicked on while scrolling, and posts that were overlooked. I also included captions from the posts (detached and out of order) to help with sequencing— some pages of captions follow a similar theme, while others are meant to show contrast, and maybe sprinkle some humor in there as well. With the captions and the pictures both detached from their proper counterparts, my goal was to show that narrative in digital space (specifically the profile) isn’t necessarily a clean beginning-to-end story. Instead it is wildly flexible, and can be remade countless times with the same material.
I set the dimensions for this book at 7x6, that way the square-ish shape could resonate with the images inside. For the font I chose Apple’s SF Pro, which is the default among Apple devices (mainly, in this case, Instagram captions). The color of the type takes on a grayish-blueish hue, which I think matches the black and white of some of the images, and, in all honesty, I thought it just felt right. Something about black type on the bright white page seemed too aggressive. The pictures in color are meant to add more thematic clarity, and maybe serve as a reminder that the finsta is not vintage, and that all of those pictures can still be accessed (in color!) in a matter of seconds. In a way, the color shift helps with chronology as well, both for the pictures themselves, and for the pacing of the book, maybe a “light at the end of the tunnel” effect.
Sample Layouts:
A section from the Introduction Essay:
In the introduction of their book Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin write, “What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (15). I see this “refashioning” (or remediation) in the conflict between finsta and diary, both back in 2017 and today in 2024, with the average finsta feed being a ghost town, and with my current diary back in the form of a physical notebook instead of a word document. I can confidently blame the obsolescence of the finsta world on three things: the Instagram stories feature (especially the ‘close friends’ story feature), information overload (both via excessive ads and the allure of other platforms like TikTok), and, simply but sadly, the reality of growing up. Instagram posting etiquette has changed, with phrases like “make insta casual again” flying around but never landing, and the newer, non chronological feed/algorithm stifling posts from friends. This means that it sometimes feels awesome to post something absurd on your story, partly because of the tragic amount of views it’ll get.
Even though my finsta career ended on a rather potent “life sucks” note in the midst of the pandemic, the nostalgia I feel for it pinpoints the remediation of its most notable qualities: privacy and the ability to post frequently and without abandon. Thus, prior finsta aficionados take to their stories, with the added assurance that stories are finite, while finsta posts, as it turns out, are not.
What does it mean for a diary to persist in digital space? How is it remediated? How does it proliferate? And how, ultimately, does it resist these changes? If diary remediated into finsta, and finsta remediated into short form, finite (and still private) content, the narrative components are hard to follow, but still exist. If I wanted to know what I was doing on a random day in February 2021, my Instagram stories archive would tell me that I was making TikTok videos instead of doing homework. On the day after that, maybe all I posted was a meme and nothing about what I did. While a diary in book form or document form still has boundaries at the beginning and end, diaristic expression on social media is fragmented, and a narrative can begin or be traced anywhere, and doesn’t have to concern itself with chronology as much as a book does— you know that when you lift the cover you’re at the beginning. The first post of my finsta is just that: the first post. But depending on the focus, many narratives can come from it. The chronology is a second thought, merely implied by scrolling through an endless grid of posts.
Working on this project has caused me to consider countless fiesta-related things, some that I’ll probably return to later. By transferring some of my finsta archive into a book layout for print, the stress between diary and finsta, private and public, and physical vs digital became my main concerns. The following visual essay is my exploration of finsta meeting page, and how the shift in medium challenges things like chronology, narrative, theme, and, of course, relevance. Is there really a “correct” way to represent these elements when the digital space is lost?