Instagram Notes is more important than it seems

With the Notes feature, #Instagram enters a new domain. A place where the users express their ideas and feelings rather than their phsyical environment. I call this the Verbal Domain of Social Media.

Instagram has been testing the Notes feature for a while, and yesterday they opened it up to almost all users.

#Instagram is going through a hidden transformation. Its recent sign is the newly launched Notes feature.

Whenever I work or teach about social media, I divide content into two main domains:

• Visual Domain includes photos, videos, stories, live broadcasts.
• Verbal Domain includes tweets, podcasts, blog posts and audio rooms.

The Visual Domain reflects what you see, how you look, where you are and who you are with.

The Verbal Domain reflects what you think, how you feel, what you know and what you advocate.

Instagram was born in the Visual Domain and it has stayed there even when people could share text as stories. The color, design, and font of those text stories were visual elements. Essentially, those stories were “designed” rather than “written”.

With the Notes feature, users share text content without visual aid for the first timein Instagram’s 10-year history. This feature is not a field of visual appeal. It’s a playfield for non-visual ideas and messages.

By positioning Notes as a hybrid between stories and tweets, Instagram opens up a new field for instant idea sharing which used to be Twitter’s field until now. Notes trigger dialogue around what a person says. The recipient of the Note has no idea whether that person is in pajamas or full make-up.

From my first impression, I can tell that Notes will hold. People adopted it fast and started playing with it with their own take. This is one of the main characteristics of a successful feature.

If such a transformative feature holds, it will widen the platform, too. 2023 will be an exciting year to witness while both Twitter and Instagram are evolving.