Table Of ContentInstapoetry
Digital Image Texts
Niels Penke
Instapoetry
Niels Penke
Instapoetry
Digital Image Texts
Niels Penke
Universität Siegen
Siegen, Germany
ISBN 978-3-662-66833-7 ISBN 978-3-662-66834-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66834-4
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#instapoetry
#instapoesie
#instapoems
#quotes
#poems
#attentioneconomy
#digitalpoetry
#digitality
#mentalhealth
#selfcare
Contents
Introduction 1
Instagram’s Creative Industry 25
Brevity and Authenticity 43
Emotional Community, Self-care, Healing 69
At the Other End of the Popularity Scale:
DIY and Imitation in the ‘Long Tail’ 83
Why all the Fighting? Ambivalences and
Dream Scenarios 97
Thanks 105
Figure References 107
References 109
vii
Introduction
“Why are you so short? Do you love, as before, now / No longer the
song?” (Friedrich Hölderlin).
Instagram is a photo and video platform. Anyone who
uses it actively and wants to post content of any kind
there has to make it into a picture. These pictures enter
into an unmanageable series of billions of other pictures
that compete for the same precious resources of atten-
tion and recognition in the form of likes and follows. A
photo is the “extension” of a “gesture” to point to some-
thing and to call “that, there it is, lo” (Barthes 1981, p. 5).
Smartphones and Instagram have opened up the possibil-
ity of permanently calling “that ,there it is” and addressing
the urgent appeal to look to an initially undefined audi-
ence. Whoever scrolls through their feed or searches for
something is always confronted with a chorus of calls like
‘Look’, ‘See,’ ‘Here it is’” (ibid., p. 5), because new posts
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag 1
GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2023
N. Penke, Instapoetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66834-4_1
2 N. Penke
appear in the feed constantly, which always wants to keep
us fed. In the stories, too, pictures are lined up with pic-
tures, and hardly anything has any duration, because every
post seen once is immediately replaced by others, even if
similar, without ever coming to an end. It is part of the
nature of this “aesthetic economy” (Böhme 2016, p. 25) of
the platform that it has implemented the immediate stim-
uli of the visible and the spontaneous feedback as constitu-
tive moments.
A conceivable bad environment for literature—one
could think. For a literature at least, which draws its gen-
uine potential from what is not immediately and obvi-
ously comprehensible, which plays with several meanings
and requires time for reading and understanding. But the
opposite is the case. In the 2010s, a fashion has been cul-
tivated worldwide to write in and with images. Instagram
has not only promoted new forms of literary communi-
cation, but also a lot of things that already existed before
and outside its network have now found their way onto
the platform, appearing in digital form in unanticipated
relationships. The following considerations will deal with
the genuine practices under the conditions of social media,
the entirely new applied forms and topics. Under the term
Instapoetry, which is used primarily as a hashtag, a liter-
ary productivity has been set free there that probably no
one thought possible. Instapoetry describes as a relatively
broad collective term (almost) everything that is not just
posted and circulated on Instagram as literary texts, but
is also primarily written for use within the platform and
designed and optimized accordingly. Since there are now
millions of texts, the spectrum of forms and genre affili-
ations is wide. Instapoetry includes both elaborately
designed and form-conscious as well as arbitrary and
sloppy (sometimes parodic) contributions between one-
liner poem and short prose, which thematically sometimes
Introduction 3
follow self-help literature (Pâquet 2019, p. 296). That
Instapoetry consists to a not inconsiderable part of more
or less thoughtful sayings with images, which could also
do service as calendar and wall tattoos (cf. Fig. 1), should
not tempt one too quickly to lump all contributions
together.
As in other arts, the creativity dispositive of the plat-
form has proven itself, under which the triad of “creativ-
ity, design, and experiences” (Frier 2020, p. 83) is brought
to distinctive forms by billions worldwide. Despite all the
dirges for what seems to be an extremely unpopular genre,
it is above all lyrical texts that are experiencing a boom or
at least short texts that are production- as well as recep-
tion-side experienced as poetry. Because it is mostly short
texts that have the greatest potential to become instagram-
mable under the conditions of platform routines - and
these best matching forms are sought in poetry. However,
the self-descriptions of the Instapoets are brief, the bio-
graphical information in the profile is limited to 150
characters. Also, the explicit reflection of (literary) doing
is brief, it comes mostly without that baggage that makes
other literatures, especially lyrical ones, appear inaccessible
to a larger audience. Here the rule applies: What You See Is
What You Need.
Nevertheless, questions are being asked about what
this particular form of poetry actually is. This becomes
visible when search engines are queried for the keyword
“Instapoetry”. Not only the number of hits, the essays
and forum discussions are astonishing, also the vehe-
mence with which advocates and critics are pulling into
the argumentative field, which is less delineated by easily
resolvable individual than by far-reaching basic questions.
It becomes apparent how great the cultural insecurity is
that has been caused by Instapoetry. Some of the most
widely received texts dealing with the phenomenon
4 N. Penke
Fig. 1 Search for “instapoetry”, 20.06.2022
