Instapoetry: Digital Image Texts 3662668335, 9783662668337

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Instagram’s Creative Industry
Brevity and Authenticity
Emotional Community, Self-care, Healing
At the Other End of the Popularity Scale: DIY and Imitation in the ‘Long Tail’
Why all the Fighting? Ambivalences and Dream Scenarios
Thanks
Figure References
References

Citation preview

Instapoetry 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 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company SpringerVerlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Heidelberger Platz 3, 14197 Berlin, Germany

#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 attention and recognition in the form of likes and follows. A photo is the “extension” of a “gesture” to point to something and to call “that, there it is, lo” (Barthes 1981, p. 5). Smartphones and Instagram have opened up the possibility of permanently calling “that ,there it is” and addressing the urgent appeal to look to an initially undefined audience. 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 GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2023 N. Penke, Instapoetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66834-4_1

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appear in the feed constantly, which always wants to keep us fed. In the stories, too, pictures are lined up with pictures, 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 stimuli of the visible and the spontaneous feedback as constitutive moments. A conceivable bad environment for literature—one could think. For a literature at least, which draws its genuine potential from what is not immediately and obviously 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 cultivated worldwide to write in and with images. Instagram has not only promoted new forms of literary communication, 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 literary 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 affiliations is wide. Instapoetry includes both elaborately designed and form-conscious as well as arbitrary and sloppy (sometimes parodic) contributions between oneliner 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 platform has proven itself, under which the triad of “creativity, 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 reception-side experienced as poetry. Because it is mostly short texts that have the greatest potential to become instagrammable 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 biographical 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 vehemence 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

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Fig. 1  Search for “instapoetry”, 20.06.2022

Introduction     5

do so with fundamental questions: “Is it ‘real’ poetry?” (Natividad 2019), “Are Instapoets Destroying the Art of Poetry?” (Ramirez 2020), “Why are we so worried about ‘Instapoetry’?” (Leszkiewicz2019), “Why do Instapoets succeed?” (Atkinson 2020)—they all point to the fact that neither the new phenomenon and its exponents explain themselves, nor that these can be understood and explained with traditional categories and criteria, let alone criticized appropriately. Saying what is meant by the term is relatively easy, since it is both a foreign and self-description for the growing text universe as a collective term, but why this practice has become so extremely popular that authors contribute with their mostly short contributions in many parts of the world and why these literary forms are so uniquely successful requires analysis. Also, the questions of cultural diagnostics, why ‘we’ should be concerned or not concerned about this phenomenon, whether the lyrical poetry is generally ‘destroyed’ or even ‘saved’ by Instagram, also require further explanations and cannot be answered with a single common hypothesis. However, the questions testify to insecurity and to experiences of disruption that result from the confrontation of established with new forms that have got a lot attention in a short time and now put everything under pressure of legitimation that lags behind in terms of numbers. What can be said for sure about Instapoetry is that at least for some of its representatives it is a “booming business” (Green 2019) that, regardless of any possible evaluation, has contributed decisively to the establishment of digital poetry on social media platforms. Between free culture and big business it is interpreted as an elementary expression of platform capitalist economy (cf. Staab 2019), because it has paved the way for a new age, the “age of

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scrolling literature” (McElwee 2017), to get used to new practices that are designed for quick, mostly intermedial reception. The texts of Instapoetry are in a continuous process, a continuum of acts of production, reception and distribution that have been carried out permanently over and over again for ten years now, producing new texts every minute, which in turn are immediately commented on, discussed and disseminated inside and outside the platform. These poetic texts, whatever they may look like, enjoy an interest that publishers, schools and the literary scene can make use of. The fact that Instapoetry is celebrated either hopefully as the future of lyric literature or rejected as its most advanced stage of decline shows that it is a question about the whole of culture for both legitimation and criticism. Affirmative as well as critical explanatory attempts are formulated strikingly often in superlatives. Instapoetry is said to be the most successful, the most favoured, the most democratic, the most popular poetry of all time, or, on the other hand, perhaps rather the worst, the most artless, the most inflationary fashion of an attention-seeking that is only disguised as literature. Regardless of the decision which of these assessments is right or wrong, Instapoetry is above all one thing: a poetry of big numbers. It is defined to a large extent by its numerically measurable attention and sales successes and is therefore perceived accordingly via a “popularization of second order” (Döring et al. 2021, pp. 11–15). The attention successes become the basis for further attention because they can arouse an increased interest about the fact that already many people have paid visible attention to a phenomenon. Especially in feuilletonistic contributions these surprising facts are discussed and asked whether Instapoetry as a whole phenomenon should be seen as sufficiently legitimate or automatically delegitimized because of these exorbitant numbers?

Introduction     7

Because the number appears on the one hand as an objective fact that can claim evidence and cannot be denied or discussed away. This also applies to the 4.5 million followers that Rupi Kaur was able to gather as the most successful and best-known of all instapoets and over eight million sold poetry books, of which her debut Milk and Honey (2014) became a bestseller and ‘longhauler’ (Egan 2021) at the same time. The over 70 million contributions under hashtag #poetry or the five million under #instapoetry are undeniable facts, but they say nothing about the form, the content or the quality of texts, only about a phenomenon of particular popularity, which is only rarely observed in connection with literary texts. On the other hand, high numerical values arouse centuries-old resentments against the approval of large groups of people and exorbitant quantities. The reasons for this are seen in special simplicity, formal as well as intellectual artlessness and unpretentiousness. It therefore seems almost inevitable that such high numbers that were unthinkable in connection with lyrical texts a few years ago will evoke these deeply rooted aversion. However, the debates that are held on the literariness of Instapoetry usually overshadow the facts of who is speaking and what is being written about: marginalized voices, often by female authors and people of color (PoC), who make themselves heard by not only experimenting with language and media formats, but also setting their own (political) agenda (cf. Gallon 2019). It quickly becomes clear that these are issues and problems of existential importance go far beyond mere “annoying experiences” (Rauscher 2020). Against this background, the question of “quality” appears to be secondary, or else an evasive maneuver to avoid dealing with the content and perspectives that are revealed there, or to delegitimize them through the exercise of aesthetic judgment. To explain the

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global popularity of this apparently artless and too pragmatic genre, such approaches contribute very little. More meaningful, however, are the superlative comparisons that refer to the hyper-paradigmatic archives of pop culture. Rupi Kaur, according to Nilanjana Roy, is the “Beyoncé of poetry” (Roy 2018) and Instapoetry as a whole is something like a “McDonald’s of writing” (Bresge 2018). Pop-stardom, worldwide fame and quickly available, tendentially unhealthy consumer goods, which are characterized by offering the same products regardless of location. However, with the reference to Beyoncé, much more is said and a more accurate comparison is made, from which some theses on Instapoetry can be derived: Beyoncé as a female mega-star and feminist PoC is a role model with a large reach and political symbolic value (cf. Stokowski 2019, pp. 136–137). These are factors that are not directly related to her role as a pop musician, but which reinforce each other in a special constellation. Music as an effect of organized sequences of tones, performed by different instruments and voices, is only one element of the overall phenomenon for which “pop” stands as “a context of images, performances, (mostly popular) music, texts and stories related to real people” (Diederichsen 2014, XI). Here, a lot can be transferred to Instapoetry if one takes this as a form of pop literature. Music may play a subordinate role, but it also appears (e.g. in the stories). What is decisive is the greater number of relevant components from which pop phenomena are composed, their interaction, their complementarity, which one cannot sufficiently understand without the others. However, this literary pop has less in common with what was described as pop literature in earlier decades, in particular with that of the 1990s, which was shaped by authors such as Nick Hornby, Christian Kracht and Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre. These were characterized by the fact that they exhibited brand

Introduction     9

names, song quotations and other references to consumer and pop culture primarily in order to aesthetically distinguish themselves from other lifestyles and style communities. No, Instapoetry is rather a pop literature that relates to other, earlier forms of literature in the same way that pop music, which came into the world in the 1950s, relates to earlier musical expressions and representations. With the expansion of relevant components, a significant shift to visuality and sociability has taken place. For this pop literature functions as a cultural practice of feedback between audience and artist (cf. Baßler 2015), with the text-environment no longer being regarded as an external and arbitrary accessory, but being integrated as an essential component. Instagram offers ideal opportunities for this, it even suggests comprehensive visualization. Even the musical pop cannot be understood without the increased visuality, without the covers of albums and singles, the logos and photos of the musicians, the posters of the stars and the experience of live events, in which sensuality and corporeality predominate, with the effect that the stars almost, but only almost, come close to being felt. Structurally, a similar visualization boost is enforced with Instapoetry, with the focus also on the bodies of the poets. Through the juxtaposition of selfies and texts in the feed, the photos and video sequences in the stories with all sorts of original sound bites from everyday life, with insights into writing scenes and processes, the texts are embedded in aesthetic and personal (auto-)biographical contexts that have become constitutive for production and reception in general. Without this image apparatus, which surrounds the individual texts, something essential was missing. Other aspects that are characteristic of pop can also be observed in this context, such as a certain “functionalism” that wants to address emotions and aims at “animation”, an aesthetics of “surfaces” that lead to the formation

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of various “style communities” (cf. Hecken 2012). But beyond the distinctive surfaces, many Instapoets aim for a depth beyond quick and colorful images, namely their own affectedness, the embodiment of physical and psychological impairments, which is actively worked on. The affectation of the reading public, which is to be emotionally touched beyond the mere I like it, is also part of the functional principle. Or the other way around: The users find literary forms that address them and initially affect them individually, they enter into exchange with others in a way that they become followers and confirm each other mutually in their actions, so that communities develop from this, to which interested parties can join in order to communicate their own (reading) experiences and possibly also their own concerns. This recursiveness is an essential component of social linkage, it is laid out in the operating principle of the platform, but it becomes an especially important element of the community building in the context of Instapoetry without these developments it wouldn’t be graspable as a global phenomenon. It is not about the mere sending and receiving, but about the shared communication about posted content, about talking about certain pieces, exchanging ideas with other enthusiasts and, as has already happened in countless fan cultures before, to become a community about common interests and shared emotions in the long term. Unlike with musical pop stars, however, the separation between stage performers and audience appears to be relatively small. The platform gives the impression that there is no stage ditch, but that the contact with and to the authors of the celebrated texts is similar to that with one’s own circle of friends. This form of parasocial communication in turn sets limits—because even if (almost) everyone can write to anyone, there is no guarantee that the direct message will be read and answered.

Introduction     11

Recursiveness also includes practices of imitation that repeat, adapt, and develop what others have done and made popular. While there is a long way to go from singing in front of the mirror to sharing the stage with the “Kings” and “Queens of Pop”, this seems to be different in the case of Instapoetry. Imitation is more likely the easier it is to accomplish technically. But repetition also confirms the phenomenon of Instapoetry as a whole, contributes to its preservation and further growth, as the number of contributions under the dominant hashtags continues to grow visibly for everyone. On the other hand, the forms appear sufficiently low-threshold due to their (apparent) unpretentiousness, as if they were easier to imitate, and the restraint is correspondingly lower to present one’s own attempts in the same medium. Analogous to photography, it also applies to poetical writing that “enormous amounts of material are newly produced that did not exist at all before digitalisation and networking or could not leave the private sphere.” (Stalder 2021, p. 112) Also the fact that the theorization of this text practices are not excessively pronounced and cultivate a decidedly non-elitist habitus (cf. Lerner 2016) encourages one to try out and join the community. This forces—like pop in music—a form of educational relief, if traditional expertise on literature does not matter anymore. Rather, this expertise obstructs access than promoting understanding. Instapoetry makes poetry easier by lightening the load of an educational tradition that scares and makes the enjoyable use less likely. Imitation and repetition refer to what is liked. The interest does not always remain passive, but is implemented in one’s own practice. It becomes clear why dominant patterns arise and certain procedures are used more often than others among the many millions of text-image combinations. The technical as well as the formal simplicity are reasons why Instapoetry, unlike many other forms of

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digital literature, has caught on with a large audience and has become extremely popular. The formal similarity of the texts within Instapoetry is therefore evidence of how a self-referential structure and style formation typical of popular cultures works. “Whenever popular cultures achieve an attention success,” media scholar Jochen Venus says, “an ensemble of similar products crystallizes at this success. Every fascination immediately goes into series, radiates out, metastasizes and involves more and more recipients in the specific form of spectacular self-reference. In this way, style communities of normalized spectacle emerge.” (Venus 2013, p. 67) The subsequent communication is characterized by a “self-similar repertoire” (ibid.), which arises through imitative or modifying emulation. For the stabilization of popular cultures, communication about these objects is just as decisive as the “ensemble of similar products” that provides new communication opportunities through the principle of “seriality”, which in turn can attract attention from previously uninvolved parties. This too is an effect of the simplicity that belongs to the principle of this special form of “particle poetics”, because it repeatedly conveys the credible impression that “anyone can write like this—in fact.” (Schulze 2020, p. 83). The analogy can be transferred to the breadth of Instapoetry that Limor Shifman has formulated with regard to memes, namely that “‘bad’ texts make ‘good’ memes in contemporary participatory culture.” (Shifman 2014, p. 86) In the formal simplicity of the texts often found to be ‘bad’ for this reason lies the recipe for the popularity of Instapoetry as a overall phenomenon, because tens of millions of texts can only be produced if the means for this are given to many. The apparently simple post implies the appeal of the DIY character and suggests: you can do that too, so do it, do it differently or better. Everyone

Introduction     13

who likes can participate in the practice without great investment costs and feed in their content in order to participate with their ideas, talents and resources (time, cognitive and emotional capacities). Instagram is designed to promote DIY, but in a different way than in hobby cellars, allotments or autonomous youth centers. Because this DIY culture takes place in front of a huge, worldwide audience, with which a direct exchange is possible, at least in theory. Unlike the inter-passive Let’s play genre, this form of writing encourages imitation in several ways, the task ‘express yourself ’ is implicit in content and media alike. It seems that what applies to photography or design also applies to Instapoetry: that the amateurs of today are the professionals of tomorrow. The professionalization through de-professionalization is another aspect that has been promoted by the enormous popularity. But not all Instapoets reach these spheres, in which the reflexive moment of pop, translating the well-known into new aesthetic or discursive contexts, comes into play. In contrast to the stars in the ‘head’, who receive the most attention and popularity, there is a long tail that forms the foundation and ensures the relative stability of the phenomenon. This means that both ends are important for the overall phenomenon, even if attention, fame and money are distributed very unevenly. Instapoetry, like pop music, has undeniably found its way into the everyday life, thinking and behaviour of many people. It is particularly popular where the supposed lack of interest in literature, especially in poetry, is great—among young people of the generations Y and Z. Analogous to young adult fiction, which is addressed to a new audience between “teenagers” and “adults”, Instapoetry was referred to as young adult poetry (Wilson 2018), because a large part of the readership is recruited from fifteen- to twenty-five-year-olds (Manovich 2017,

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p. 133). This popularity is global, because the attention successes can be observed not only in one identifiable target group or in certain regions, but (with few exceptions) worldwide. After the pop culturalization of art and music, now a pop culturalization of poetry, which, one could conclude, does not seek clarity in the material, because this remains colourful and diverse, but in the outcome and the effects that are deliberately targeted. Like pop music, Instapoetry also has the tendency to spread almost worldwide in a short period of time. Analogous to the selfie, whose image patterns “resemble each other worldwide” (Ullrich 2021, p. 41), a digital image and text culture has emerged as a form of world literature with Instapoetry, which has emerged in all parts of the world in which Instagram is available in a short period of time. It was not only raised to the status of world literature retrospectively by expert scrutiny and praise, or constituted by a paradigmatic individual text that provokes imitations all over the world, but this happened almost instantaneously, through a shared practice. English has proven to be the lingua franca of Instapoetry, because all popular Instapoets have published their texts in English, and thus, like the selfie, have created “a globally understandable form of communication: with images and pictograms, beyond the confusion of Babylonian languages” (Ullrich 2021, p. 43). Nevertheless, there is now similar poetry in Arabic, Farsi and Hindi, Urdu and Japanese, French, Norwegian, German or Czech, which, contrary to the mainstream, address particular audiences. The differentiation into numerous individual languages is a subsequent effect, which is worth taking a closer look at in terms of work on language and form. Here it is enough to note the globalization. In the light of this global spread of “pop” that aimes at shimmering surfaces, commodity form and the formation

Introduction     15

of style communities, the not too surprising accusation that Instapoetry is a typical expression of the global culture industry can be seen in the analogy to the fast food restaurant chain McDonalds- a colorful arsenal of mass-produced trivial products that are presented to the (allegedly mindless) masses for immediate consumption (Pâquet 2019, p. 302). Poems like hamburgers that look and taste the same all over the world. But Instapoetry is not a standardized franchise system, but a creative practice that produces similar products in many places, but has by no means arisen as a product placement ‘from above’. However, it should not be forgotten that these forms of poetry are published and communicated within a platform that is itself part of the culture industry, whose incentive system is one of the dark sides of the text practice. As with many popular phenomena, the social dimension plays an important, if not even the decisive role. This means that what is done with a cultural artifact and how it is talked about is at least as important as the ‘real dimension’, that is, music as music or literature as literature. However, Instapoetry, whose factual dimension is determined by text and image alike, is already networked within the platform, so that the social dimension has become an inseparable part of the real dimension in the social media context. Any non-observance of this interweaving obstructs the understanding. This has consequences for every text that is designed under these conditions. The public feedback that is visible to everyone also makes it clear what is obviously of great importance beyond the literary communication that is curated by gatekeepers. It is therefore so popular on Instagram because it is perhaps discriminated against and categorically excluded elsewhere, but certainly because very few literary offers are freely accessible. Only the free access makes it likely that enough people will participate. The smartphone plays the

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decisive mediating role. That Instapoetry has found a place in the everyday lives of many of its recipients—and can also fulfill the “intimacy function” of pop (Diedrichsen 2014, XVIII)—is due to the smartphone, which is almost always there and allows access to profiles and texts everywhere. Unlike the stationary record collection, the large selection of Instagram pop literature is always available in a kind of mobile self-service store. To ask and follow popularity seems to me to be a suitable approach to describe and understand the phenomenon of Instapoetry in terms of its conditions, its functions and its relative stability. This is more than just following the follow the money trail. Of course it is also about (partly much) money and its promises, which are made on different levels by different actors, but popularity also makes other relations clearer, such as those of the media infrastructure. The inventors and operators of the platform set the conditions under which communication is made possible, under which (visible) parameters the users act and which affordances become effective on this basis. That there are likes and followers are constitutive moments of every action which have been extended by algorithmic processes, advertising partnerships and opportunities for self-promotion. All of these settings are programmed for popularity. They pass this on to their users—who in turn are promised reputation and success in view of their efforts to increase popularity. What applies to cute animals and influencers for baby clothing also applies to those who want to succeed with literary writing in this environment. The proof of the validity of the promise of success is provided by those who have already become famous and rich. What applies to successful influencers also shows itself for the protagonists of Instapoetry. Communities join them, individual followers or stronger tied fan communities, which ensure the maintenance of popularity,

Introduction     17

but which in turn develop hopes and claims, which imitate and emulate, which also seek attention with their feelings, words and texts and dream of being read and loved. From the promise that they can make it, Instagram lives as a machine, but also the phenomenon of Instapoetry lives. The usage routines play just as big a role in this context as the possibilities of acquiring, buying or selling popularity, of negotiating attention in different relations. Popularity, which is not primarily anchored in persons or concrete artefacts such as individual books, shows patterns and networks such as the emotional communities which also become visible to non-involved persons through hashtags. The communication of value judgments also takes place along the distinction between the popular and the non-popular. For the “apocalyptic” perspective, popularity is always an indication of danger and a symptom of decline, while the “integrated” experience confirmation through the high approval ratings: They are confirmed in it that everything is right, as it is and what they do. Popularity as a technically induced algorithm is an economic program with numerous social effects— Instapoetry as a popular phenomenon owes its existence to this arrangement as much as it problematizes these logics as a topic. Popularity is a constant curse and an even more constant promise to be able to impose one’s concerns through numerical growth. This purely quantitative popularity is measured within the platform on a permanent basis and displayed visibly to everyone. Likes, follower numbers, the number of total posts under certain hashtags, all this is automatically determined and displayed, but also processed algorithmically. The algorithmic management ensures a permanent and automatic relevance assessment that is not transparent to actors such as followers. This means that two levels of popularity must be assumed: an internal one, of which we

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only see a few data. Despite all the pretended cosiness: “the app is thinking in terms of numbers, not people” (Frier 2020, p. 279). The creative individual is a number in the gearbox of the computer, which determines values and assigns positions in disregard of the real person. In addition, there is another dimension of popularity, which is expressed in visible communication, it stimulates self-marketing and materialises in book sales. This is what finally makes it possible for the quantitative growth of numbers to turn into a qualitatively different state. Suddenly, poetry books are on sale at the front of the bookshop and there are lecture performances, reminiscent of pop concerts, in front of a large audience that is eager to buy merchandise. But it would be too easy to describe this constellation from the perspective of one of the well-known roles of “apocalyptic and integrated intellectuals” (Umberto Eco). On the one hand, proponents of high culture despising the popular culture, who from a pronounced distance and with little knowledge of the short texts and their new media environment, only see the ultimate decline of ‘proper’ literature and an appropriate style that harmoniously combines thoughts and sound. The course of modernity as a cultural decline process, here it finally comes to an end, because the ‘apocalypse’ is understood as ‘revelation’. The whole (Instapoetry in particular, Instagram and social media in general) are then understood as merely the latest expression of a culture-industrially preformed pseudo-activity and pseudo-art, which stand in opposition to an art or poetry committed to the real and beautiful, what distinguishes ‘true’ from ‘false’ art. The catalogue of these oppositions, to which a “popular criticism of popular culture” (Eco 1994, p. 16) has been oriented since Friedrich Schiller, is short, but still effective, as the debate about the new “Midcult” (Baßler 2021), a verdict that was also pronounced on Instapoetry, has shown.

Introduction     19

Approaches of this kind obscure the view of Instapoetry as a possible paradigm of a new literary aesthetics that unites different interests (moral, political) and also integrates them into the Aisthesis, the perception by its audience. The “Midcult” accusation aims to maintain the ambivalence and ‘free play’ as elements of a high literature or art (“high culture”) that is superior to other forms. Many Instapoets therefore break with the modern concept of the autonomy of art, not because they want to contribute to a sham art and a culture-industrially organized mass fraud, but because they know all too well about the heteronomy of human life and therefore also of artistic production. Determinations that contribute to the fact that Instapoetry is mostly heteronomous poetry that is primarily associated with pragmatic functions. Casual poetry (‘Gebrauchsdichtung’) is everything that does not obey the self-legislation of autonomous poetry. This poetry was written on the occasion or with a view to a specific context of use that went beyond the pleasure in the text, but served as a suitable (poetic) workpiece for religious purposes, praise, memory or mourning. Instapoetry is oriented towards motivating functions that go beyond the aesthetic impression and are intended to stimulate, encourage or empower its readers. With a view to older forms of edifying literature, one could speak of “new comforters” (cf. Engelmeier 2021, p. 16), whose texts also enable “edifying reading” in the digital context. It therefore seems no coincidence that many prominent examples of this “Midcult” are non-white and noncis-male authors. The question of aesthetic autonomy does not arise for the majority of Instapoets at all. It can be assumed that this also has to do with their respective background, because even in this constellation the question can be asked why they should “appeal to an idea the development of which has taken place to a large extent without

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them? How should they feel something as emancipatory and therapeutic that they have only experienced as exclusion and disrespect?” (Ullrich 2019). In contrast, an aesthetic perception and evaluation modus, which can do without ethical and political content or subordinate these to the form, requires a corresponding privileged observer-I, which was historically conceived as male and primarily white. Such an aesthetics, which functions as a perception from a safe and therefore ‘disinterested’ distance, was conceived by Immanuel Kant. But this necessary distance of purely aesthetic perception is by no means always possible. The concrete danger as well as systemic constraints prevent this attitude—the conditions of the possibility of aesthetic perception therefore include the security of not being involved, affected or threatened. Those who have been injured and have to fear being injured again can hardly take this modus or do not want to afford the “disinterested” pleasure because their actors primarily consider themselves as ‘marked’ people who do not seek abstraction and generalization, but rather derive their mandate from their concrete ‘being-so’. Against this background, Instapoetry is eminently ethical and political, because in the face of injustice and violence, the aesthetic cannot be given primacy. Once again, it can be confirmed that the meaning of social media content develops through its embedding in social contexts and the life reality of its users. Those who are not part of an active community, who are not involved in communication in real time, have a deficit that characterizes the “apocalyptic” position. On the other hand, there are the “integrated” ones who not only see a radical renewal of poetry, in which they joyfully participate, but also feel a democratization of literary communication, because, thanks to Instagram, publishers, feuilletons and book prize˗jurys no longer decide as

Introduction     21

gatekeepers about how and when texts are published, discussed and evaluated, but (potentially) all of the users. The means of poetic production, the evaluation tools and the commentary section are now available to all in the same way. Now the permanent vote of all could finally find out without institutional interference what is really important, and above all, what that kind of poetry is, which the people really like, which affects their lives, which touches them and helps them. But only almost—because inside˗ as well as outside perspectives are determined by different blind spots, each of which misses what the other perspective focuses on—too much distance and contextual reference here, too little reflection on the conditions of possibilities and their consequences there. But both must be thought together in order to make a differentiated assessment of the phenomenon of Instapoetry, its literary forms as well as its platform-specific conditions. The phenomenon must then be asked why so many millions of people participate, build and maintain communities, why they generate popularity in high numbers not only once, but permanently—with which goals and benefits, but also on which basis, with which dependencies and at what price do they join. How is this popularity possible, which on the one hand has produced superstars of literature, on the other hand has promoted a form mass text production, in which hundreds of thousands of people interactively participate worldwide? An analysis of Instapoetry must be thinking together the aesthetic practices and actors with the platform and the given media conditions. I would like to try this with the help of a concept coined by the media scholar Lev Manovich: Instagramism. Manovich understands this as a certain combination of form and content, which is characterized by a special sensitivity, attitude and tonality (Manovich 2017, p. 73). Manovich sees the

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Instagrammism as an aesthetic movement like other isms of modern art (surrealism, cubism or futurism) before it. Characteristic of this aesthetics of a “new global digital youth class that emerges in early 2010s” is (Manovich 2017, p. 119), that like these earlier isms it has shaped its own “vision of the world” and its own “language of images” (ibid., p. 115). This is characterized by a certain minimalism, which does not always, but often leads to “casual”(Manovich 2017, p. 52) production, capturing and communicating occasional experiences. Characteristic of this are also style communities that differ from others; they find sense in cultivating their own “poetic design” (ibid., p. 85), which breaks with binary orders of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, of art and design, independent (ibid., p. 86) and commercial, of ‘high’ and ‘low’ (ibid., p. 86). As a general and defining pattern, Manovich takes the“presence of Instagrammer’s body in the designed photos” (ibid., p. 125), which turns away from traditional positioning “outside of the scene s/he records according to perspectival rules. Instead, she is in the scene, in the situation, in the moment.” (ibid.) They become bodies through the media staging, bodies that are striving for recognition, that have weight. Bodies that matter. These aspects can, as I will show below, be transferred to the Instapoetry which is designed for this very platform. The Instagrammism fosters a certain visual aesthetics, with which a specific aisthesis is not only served, but constituted and finally taken for granted for further use under the conditions of medial affordances. This mode of perception is quickly learned and perpetuated continuously through the countless images and videos in the feed and stories. Up to 350 likes per hour, but several accounts can be operated. Whoever uses Instagram to such an extent, the permanent-feeding feed becomes a fattening plant.

Introduction     23

This poetic Instagramism is fed by a young, globally practicing ‘class’ that has developed a minimalist style of casual poetry that often, but not always, starts from concrete experiences or current feelings and overcomes dual orders. This also applies to the self-presentation and self-perception as ‘normal’ authors who simply stay unaffected by a positioning in ‘high’ and ‘low’. But in a poetry where (mostly) the author is (also) present in the text— and often physically comes to light in the image—no separation can be made, because both derive their legitimacy and authentication from each other. But even beyond this special image aesthetics, the term Instagrammism can be understood as an ism in the sense of the history of ideas, or even more the history of ideology. Instagram may only have existed for a short time and it is by no means certain that the platform will still be relevant in five or ten years. But for the 2010s and 2020s, it constitutes one of the most important privately controlled public spheres that has almost global influence on cultural dynamics. And it is a very specific ism that lies at the heart of the platform, but is only made explicit to a limited extent. An ism that consists of a creativity dispositif and media affordances, seemingly unlimited possibilities for individual expression and creative self-development for billions of users, but which, if they want to make the best possible use of the ‘opportunities’, are subject to a performance-driven work ethic that drives them to restless activity in order to make themselves a brand in the name of “human-branding” (Pâquet 2019, p. 297). Restless, because automated quantification constantly keeps the numbers in view as performance indicators and makes them visible to everyone, but above all because the algorithm is programmed to assess performance, it constantly detects valences based on popularity. What is popular is

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rated as interesting and relevant, what is not popular is disadvantaged and deprioritized. Instagrammism is characterized by an implemented governance that runs as a constant control in the name of voluntariness and encourages creative activity. This implemented agenda is committed to neoliberal principles. A key component of Instagrammism is the “neoliberal self(ie) gaze” (Saraswati 2021, p. 1), a (photographically mediated) look at the (poetic) self that is made into a “spectacle” (ibid., p. 11) and developed into a kind of “success story” (ibid., p. 7). This self develops self-techniques to express itself and work on itself (therapeutically) up to self-exploitation and ever more intimate confessions. While it appears attractive, entertaining and inspiring to others, the self is always “in the process” (ibid., p. 44) and never comes to an end of its story, because this model of “neoliberal alchemy” is characterized by the experienced and poetic “pain” to transform into “phantasmagoria” and “gold”, without a concrete promise for the future (ibid., p. 67). “What will poetry become, with an algorithm as our muse?” (Naji 2021, p. 5), Jeneen Naji asks in her book Digital Poetry. Instapoetry could be the most relevant answer to this question so far.

Instagram’s Creative Industry

The question of where Instapoetry comes from and how it is possible to explain the gigantic success of this image and text practice and its most prominent representatives can only be answered by taking into account the technical development of the platform, its popularization and the constantly expanding user groups. The later hype around Instapoetry can only be understood as a mutual production, as a “dance of agency” (Pickering 1995, VII), in which technical infrastructure and usage practices influence each other. However, the metaphor of the dance suggests a deceptive illusion in this case, because one, the leading side, the platform, only makes a few steps (such as the introduction of new features and functions), but it constantly moves others—and lets them ‘dance’. Instagram does provide spaces that offer the opportunity to post an unlimited number of posts and stories using image and text forms as well as video formats, but their conditions, their technical limitations, are unchangeable. This makes © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2023 N. Penke, Instapoetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66834-4_2

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Instapoetry a platform-specific literature that, unlike other forms of digital literature, only shows one side of the text, namely the interface, that is, what appears on the screen or the mobile display. There is no longer any access or insight into the scripts underlying the representation. So what is formulated in the code (in Python and JavaScript), which determines the algorithm, there is no access or insight. The business model of the platform is therefore based on the idea of “exploring the creative possibilities in the restriction” (Nymoen/Schmitt 2021, p. 71)—and thus cultivating the entrepreneurial self. Instagram has definitely succeeded in mobilizing and stabilizing large creativity potentials, as the over 50 billion posts (as of 2021) show. It provides the means to design ‘phantasmagorias’ that have strong binding forces and are fascinating in a sustainable way, because the majority of users do not turn away again after a short time, but their number is getting bigger and bigger. And this rapidly, almost as quickly as the name suggests. Instagram is a portmanteau of Instant Camera and Telegram, so it already bears the immediacy of visual and textual communication in its name. Since the product was introduced in October 2010, the platform has undergone some changes that have gradually expanded the range of possibilities for designing and distributing images. The affordances have therefore shifted as well as the usage practices. I understand affordances in this context as the offering character of the platform, which opens up action spaces in which people can interact with each other, but at the same time defines conditions for these interactions that make certain actions more likely than others. Affordances exist “from the user’s point of view on at least two levels”, which are composed of the design of the media artifact (e.g. the smartphone) and a “medially written world in the form of representations” (Kaerlein 2018, p. 165). Simplicity is the

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priority, so that “it is always clear as intuitively as possible which steps are required to carry out certain tasks” (ibid.). In the context of Instagram, this means above all the provision of opportunities for publishing one’s own photos and the associated prospect of dissemination and resonance from other private users, but also from companies. If you take part, you subject yourself to the affordances of the technical possibilities and finally also to the functions of the medium—deviations and alternative use are possible, but lead to disadvantages in the ‘game’. Affordance not only refers to the offer, but also to the invitation to act in the way that the media possibilities prescribe and to enter the fight for attention, likes and followers with one’s content. This not only puts users into networks in order to benefit from these contacts in one way or another, but it is always also about making these networks visible. Instagram thus installs a constant mutual observation in permanent connectivity. However, the number of “shared and also viewed, commented and rated reading activities” increases “the probability of being noticed” (Porombka 2018, p. 144). The digital revolution therefore represents an exponential jump. In his theory of communication, Niklas Luhmann repeatedly emphasized that the introduction of writing separated communication and understanding spatially and temporally from each other, thus creating a “tremendous explosion of connection possibilities” (Luhmann 1997, p. 266)—these have been multiplied by a multitude of new codes, emojis and stickers, not least by the possibilities of intertwining text and image, written and spoken word including technical processing. The connection possibilities have been increased by the extremely simplified possibilities of sharebility and spreadability and thus extremely accelerated. In a general sense, digitality already means a specific cultural intertwining through the

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technology used, in which “referentiality, community and algorithmicity influence each other” (Stadler 2021, p. 13), because users are always already part of a communicative network in which other users are located. However, especially in extensive networks, they remain in the invisibility of latency until they are either displayed in the feed of followers (assuming that the account has such) or on a popular page (today this is called explore on Instagram) or accessed through active research. Whether a post is displayed to others is always a question of probability. Instagram has always been primarily visual (and later also audio-visual) and has remained stable in terms of its Twitter-inspired organizational pattern. There are user profiles with the function of ‘following’ other accounts (follow) and thus getting their content displayed in their own individual feed. Every technical innovation on Instagram has changed the affordances and, usually instantly, led to changed usage practices. One of the most important innovations was the introduction of hashtags in January 2011. These tags immediately, as with Twitter, provided the most important way to network content. Hashtags allow for targeted searches, provide information about the totality of certain topic bundles, and refer to the most relevant accounts of the respective topic spectrum. In doing so, they also contribute significantly to group formation in order to inscribe themselves in self-selected contexts or, in turn, open up their own (micro-)discourses (cf. Glanz 2018). Hashtags are therefore opportunities for self-determination that are due to a conscious setting in contrast to the algorithmically generated “calculated publics” (Gillespie 2017, p. 96). This also applies to the ability to link to other posts and profiles (from July 2013). In this way, it is possible to ‘parasitically’ participate in the popularity and attention success of other users. This also true for all hashtags associated with literary content. Under

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unspecific-general hashtags such as #literature or #poetry, in addition to self-written content, there are also posts that exhibit the texts of third parties in special designs. In addition to the memefication of canonical authors, this has also created new attention for ‘forgotten’ poets (cf. Vuille 2020). In August 2016, a Snapchat-oriented function was introduced to post short videos, so-called stories, which in turn were supplemented by the function of live videos for direct transmission in November 2016. Finally, in February 2017, the slideshow feature was added, which allows multiple photos to be posted under one post, which can then be viewed by scrolling sideways. The operational structure of the platform, however, has remained the same. From the very beginning, the profile has been at the center of the access as an open work-structure that is individually designed—this applies to the postings and stories that make a profile visible to others, but also to the decisions about likes and follows, on the basis of which it is algorithmically calculated what is displayed in the feed. In June 2018, Instagram announced that there were over one billion active accounts in use worldwide. Immense numbers in a network in which people express themselves in pictures and text and communicate with a clear reference to their own experiences, which again and again confirm what the company has given out as its unique selling point: “Twitter was about opinions, Instagram was about experiences—and anyone could be interested in anyone else’s visual experiences, anywhere in the world” (Frier 2020, p. 31). This is where the business model of social media platforms is laid out, which aims at the “capitalization of all possible expression events” (Vogl 2021, p. 130). Whether opinions or experiences, they can be turned into a spectacle and subjected to the assessment by an unknown audience. Each expression event is oriented towards instantaneous impression events—whether

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“wow!”, “crazy!”, “amazing!”, “cute!”, “sad!”, “oh my!”, “so sorry!”, verbalized or expressed in an emoji. Instagram actually sees itself, as its founders repeatedly emphasize in their self-descriptions, as a platform for promoting creativity. The journalist Sarah Frier has traced this effort in her book no filter (2020), which is based on conversations with the key people and tells the story of the company. If you believe the founders and developers, Kevin Systrom and Mark Krieger, then Instapoetry appears to be the fulfillment and redemption of their general resolutions: “simplicity” (Frier 2020, p. 28) is one of the core concepts of the philosophy of the company founded in 2010, with which the simplicity of orientation on the platform, but also the publication and dissemination of content are meant, because Instagram should be “simpler and faster” (ibid.) than all other apps. The emphatic goal of the company, as already with Facebook (Zuckerberg 2017 ff.), is the creation of a “community” (Frier 2020, p. 34). A community that, unlike Facebook, does not repeat existing friendships and family connections digitally, but rather creates new ones that are based solely on sympathy, shared aesthetic preferences or common interests. The following, as implemented by Instagram, is based on a “non-obligatory reciprocity” (Paßmann 2020, p. 1) in relation to the mutuality of ‘friendship’ relationships on Facebook. So nobody is forced to follow their followers in turn. This principle also makes it easier to achieve large numbers, as public accounts do not require active confirmation. The community is to be formed through commonalities: on shared interests, experiences and feelings. However, the catalog of positive attributes is even longer. The Instagram founders also claim “craft and creativity”, “beauty”, “experience”, “art”, “relatibility”, “immediacy and intimacy” (Frier 2020, p. 135, 66, 35, 37, 100) for

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their platform, the contributions there should be “meaningful and genuine” (ibid., p. 103) in order to be able to implement the double strategy of “inspire creativity” (ibid.) and “amplify the good” (ibid., p. 279). Instagram is, at least according to the aspirations of its creators, a candidate for the title “the internet’s utopia”, a happy, highly inclusive utopia in which “empathy” should prevail instead of “division” (ibid., p. 220). However, these claims have not yet been fully realized, as is the nature of utopia. Because the many positive goals and qualities are opposed by an equally long list of problems that arise from the frequent use of the app. As Frier’s book repeatedly emphasizes, the main problem is “pressure”, pressure that is promoted by the competition of all content and the permanent comparison of all with all. With “compare and despair” (ibid., p. 248), this vicious circle is described, which orients perception and thinking on a few external standards such as likes, follows and other feedback, and the consequence of which is permanent dissatisfaction—because there are always others who have already posted new content, gained higher like numbers and more followers, there can be neither satisfaction nor fulfillment when “as an unlimited, insatiable desire, an inversion of the lack into the inner spaces of the economic subjects” has been carried out (Vogl 2021, p. 160). Frier emphasizes that “anxiety” (Frier 2020, p. 248), fear or rather various forms of fear and worry, are the main consequences, which in turn promote other practices considered problematic, such as “faking” and “filtering”, that is, completely misrepresenting facts or adapting reality to ideals through technical aids, such as the filters with which Instagram has become known, as enhanced reality to extend, increase and, for better or worse, intensify personal expressions. Frier even talks about entirely new realities being invented in order to be “instagrammable” at all (ibid.,

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p. 173). The blame for these bad dynamics lies with the algorithm, which, according to Frier, has sacrificed creativity and the empathic insights into the life-worlds of others to the fight for attention and likes by setting Instagram as a “game” of universal competition on a permanent basis: “The version of Instagram that the founders had set out to create, one that would foster art and creativity and provide visual windows into the lives of others, was slowly being warped by the metrics Instagram prioritized, turning the app into a game that one could win.” (ibid., p. 233) Instead of the curated features, the automated processes of prioritization and deprioritization have taken the place, thanks the main algorithm. Those who “perform too little” or “not good enough” are correspondingly downgraded and have a lower chance of being seen by other users. This in turn means that if you want to play the “game”, you have to produce new content on a regular basis and go on a like-hunt through active action. The algorithm increases the pressure and rewards those performances that act as the ideal requested. In addition to activating as many users as possible, this also results in a standardization of their behavior, through rules of the “game”, the compliance of which promises the great success in terms of attention. This is what Instagram means as a game—“a game that one could win”. The game is the illusion of a chance. It is also the dream of an agenda that programs permanent and therefore restless activity for creativity and self-expression, with no other goal than to achieve the best possible numbers by displaying one’s own self. From the open and playful amateur creativity (cf. Vadde 2017) it quickly becomes a permanent task, which competitively structures the provoked creativity and, with prospects of success, encourages professionalization. A task that does not differ so much from other forms of work—except for the not unimportant fact that Instagram does not share its revenues with

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those who produce the tremendous data. This is also the main reason for the various monetization strategies that try to convert the potential of the many addressees into product advertising as influencing or the marketing of their own articles. The cultural theorist Sianne Ngai has described such a life in a hamster wheel, which, in view of the permanent overload caused by too many options and tasks that the subject has to react to, and therefore always on the verge of collapse, as “zany” (Ngai 2012, pp. 174–232). She understands “zaniness” as one of the fundamental aesthetic categories in capitalism, with which life is transformed into work. For some users, this relentless competition in productivity is a nightmare, a dance in chains that makes the lack of freedom all the more conscious the more competition there is or the “urge to move” manifests itself in the direction of experiment and “violation” of the usual communication routines. Experiments are therefore tendentially dangerous, while the pressure to standardize is constantly high. It is not for nothing that the suffering caused by the platform is written into its designation as “Instagrief ” (Sanyal 2021, p. 325)—these burdens always have to be reconciled with the possibilities that Instagram creates and the advantages it offers. This struggle is sometimes reflected in Instapoetry. However, the willingness with which the core attributes of the creative industry are fulfilled prevails: “craft and creativity”, “relatibility”, “immediacy and intimacy”, “meaningful and genuine”. Transfered to Instapoetry, this means that we are dealing with creative artistry, the creators of which can be related to in a (supposedly) personal way, which are in the focus of a community that is confirmed by shared participation. The immediacy of communication, on the other hand, creates (at least the impression of ) intimacy. Taken together, something results that is

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“meaningful” and just as “real” as honest. Truly good intentions to set up in a utopian space. All of this is initially just promises that create the impression that the platform functions in such a way that this utopian state can also be realized. Instagram’s creative industry, which is designed to encourage as many people to use it as possible, is based on the greatest possible openness and promises ideal opportunities to assert oneself and one’s abilities. Instagram in general and Instapoetry in particular live from the network effect, which consists in the fact that a network “becomes more useful and attractive the more people it connects with each other” (Stalder 2021, p. 231). So the DIY idea is crucial for the creativity dispositif, even though it has long been overshadowed by the widespread professionalization. “Everyone should get down to monetizing their own creativity and thus discover new niches and opportunities.” (ibid., p. 37) Creativity is the trigger that is supposed to bring the many into the use of the network, in order to, and this is the goal of their activation, quasi playfully discover new possibilities of monetization. Because it should not be forgotten that Instagram pursues a sophisticated business model. Neither the download of the app nor the monthly use costs any money—Instagram is a data collector and based on this an advertising platform that, because it knows so much about so many people and their preferences, promises targeted personalized advertising and correspondingly good placement chances. This approach has made the platform its own market that is concerned with the “generation of supplementary consumption”, the offer of which “would not exist without the infrastructure of the proprietary markets.” (Stab 2019, p. 216) That as many people as possible have access to the app and use it regularly is just as important as that the promises mentioned above are maintained, so that the mobilization of an “everyday

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creativity” does not break off (Shifman 2014, p. 99). What started with simple photo filters is now noticeable for many artistic disciplines that are flooded with new content. These products are due to “everyday innovative and artistic practices that can be carried out by simple production means” (ibid., p. 99), which, however, do not remain in the private life of individuals, but are shaped and communicated by the medium, as Shifman writes with reference to Jean Burgess, “that new media have reshaped it by turning hidden and mundane practices (such as singing in front of the mirror) into highly visible public culture.” (ibid., p. 100). If you transfer these theses to Instapoetry, we are dealing with a phenomenon that has been made possible by the technically conditioned possibilities of digitalization, which would not have arisen at all without this many individual contributions or would have remained offline in the desk and nightstand drawers of the writers private lifes. But maybe the texts would also have been submitted to large publishers and rejected, only to finally appear in enthusiastic small publishers or as a book on demand— but without the necessary popularity and without the prospect of global resonance. Attention and affective resonance, which are supposed to lead to likes, shares and follows, are the primacy of media economy. Media usage is (albeit often unconsciously) determined by allocation questions, i.e. the use of time, attention, likes and other “gifts” that benefit the recipient or their account. Automated ranking and scoring allow everyone to keep their numbers in view at all times (cf. Reichert 2015); the possibilities increase if you switch to a “professional account” as a Business or Creator Account, on which various advertising options can also be set. The statistics that provide information about follower growth and decline, development of like numbers

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and views of stories are particularly interesting. Every profile can be turned into a small business with the push of a button—paid ads can be used to respond to falling numbers to make new popularity successes more likely. With quantification comes a belief in the objective power of the factual, which materializes in the numbers. High numbers have a convincing effect, there must be something that has caused this popularity, which is interesting enough for many. Previous successes can then be used in a “second-order popularization” (Döring et al. 2021, pp. 11–15) and the previous attention successes can be used for further promotional purposes. Such numerical popularity is always precarious: It can be questioned at any time and, if recognized as a valid instrument, allows an exact location in a relevance order. The like-function of Instagram subjects everything that is published on the platform to a permanent vote. You can vote on everything and everyone, 24 h, day in, day out. Whether political decisions, individual opinions, animal pictures, sports events or literary texts, they are all presented in the same way and evaluated according to the same parameters. Instagram has indeed opened a plebiscite, but it does not lead to any decision-making, but only to spontaneous orders of relevance and evaluation criteria that may be different tomorrow. This logic of popularity corresponds in central points to a neoliberal agenda that knows no stability because it forces the permanent process. Popularity scores are similar to stock prices, they show current moods and interests and allow the direct comparison of otherwise incommensurable things. But popularity, as a product of measured attention, is always only provisional—the likes of yesterday may still have value, but those of a year ago? Little ages faster than quantitative attention success—or what claim can still be derived today from a Myspace account with many thousand ‘friends’? Popularity that is continuously

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calculated and issued in numerical values drives repetition, confirmation or further growth. Playing along and growing follow the principle of post or perish, as often and as resonantly as possible. The fiction of equal opportunity is based on the same production resources that are available to everyone: static and moving images (as post, story or reel) plus a text field. Images are the “universal language” of Instagram, because the effect is promoted “that each of its participants and each photograph is formally and functionally equated” (Bieling 2018, p. 45). The always equal sequence of square photographs has the effect that every unknown appears in a known form and therefore promotes the impression of “equality and comparability”, which reinforces the impression that Instagram is an “egalitarian and ‘democratic’ platform” (ibid., p. 42). For all the “relatability” and “intimacy”, it depends on the first visual impression when it comes to likes and publicly visible approval. This has the consequence for the vast majority of content that they have to subordinate themselves to the primacy of visuality, because the “staging value” dominates (Böhme 2016, p. 27). This has far-reaching consequences for everything that is to be shown there, which is not primarily of a visual nature. Not how a food tastes, how a piece of clothing sits or how a cute dog feels in its costume is decisive, but only how they look and what impressions they convey. Visuality becomes the primary quality that pushes all others into the background. This is particularly true for texts of any kind. Not their content, their argumentative persuasiveness, linguistic refinement or versatility are in the foreground, but their visual representation, because it is this that inevitably competes with all other, also optically as attractive and appealing designed contributions. In the light of these media conditions, it is all the more the major differences that decide on success or failure, on

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the probability of being noticed a lot or a little. Because where large numerical values are already aggregated in one account, it is all the more likely that they will be repeated, that is, the desired attention, which is expressed in likes and follower numbers, will be confirmed or continue to grow. Even in the field of Instapoetry, a ‘head’, the upper attention area in which the top accounts are located, and a ‘long tail’ can be identified, in which the great majority of Instapoets are ranked. What applies to the most popular Instapoets in general also applies to the accounts of the Kardashians and Jenners, Christiano Ronaldo or Selena Gomez that are strongest in numbers: that they have an almost insurmountable lead in popularity. Given these oligopolistic positions, it is an illusion that is reproduced cheerfully, that everyone would have the same opportunities and conditions to reach the top with high-quality content. What was initially achieved through curated features is today influenced by algorithmic processes. However, a great deal of investment in time and money is necessary for those who want to grow their accounts and increase the standing of their operators. But as much as they may be driven by the prospect of success and stardom, the best places are already taken. To rise to the first category, the ‘head’ of Instapoetry, to Rupi Kaur, R.M. Drake or Atticus, becomes increasingly unlikely as the phenomenon and thus the number of participants grow wider. The time invested, the attention and interactions therefore benefit the platform primarily, its business model is based on the permanent production of data, which is only successful as long as the hope of advancement is maintained. So the starting conditions are highly different, especially since the early Instapoets have brought along part of their following from Tumblr and had a good basis for expanding their attention successes. Nevertheless, Instagram lives from the illusion and the associated promises that it everyone can make it, to

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gain fame through high-quality contributions, the necessary persistence and the right investment or even become a brand with their products. All accounts, regardless of their content and objectives, are affected by this logic. Anyone who wants to be successful under these conditions needs a strict attention economy. You can’t follow everyone, like or comment on all of their contributions, nor can you run a large account so that every direct message is answered personally, only a few people get such messages, the rest get responses made up of standardized pieces of text, or no response at all. Despite the assurances of how important the community is, it is often a one-sided affair—one side, which is part of the scene of common attention, receives and applauds, is far from the benefiting side despite all the apparent closeness. Direct communication—everyone writes messages to everyone and could talk to each other on an equal footing—turns out to be a parasocial one if feedback and confirmation are only communicated in one direction, but no reaction is forthcoming. Popularity then stands in an increasingly tense relationship to ‘relatability’, it requires the successful suggestion that senders and receivers communicate with each other on the same level, which represents the apparent equality and, despite the enormous differences in follower numbers, always maintains the proximity to the community. Even if the company may hope for something else with its emphatic concept of community (namely the largest possible number of people who use the app and make as much use of it as possible), the construction and maintenance of communities is an essential factor. This aspect should be taken seriously in particular for Instapoetry, because community (as communitas ) refers to ‘cum munus’, where ‘munus’ can mean many things: burden, obligation, gift, office, from whose existence the community arises (cf. Esposito 2004). At its origin there is a

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deficiency: a gap to be filled, an obligation shared by several, a contribution that everyone makes to the community—the deficiency evokes something that is always still outstanding. Between that what is shared and the gift, between the topic and attention as an investment of time, thoughts and emotions, not least of money, communities are constituted, they exist because time and again a choice has been made against other alternatives. The investments made in turn act as motivation for phatic communication, to stay and to look further, so that they do not fall into worthlessness and meaninglessness. So it is also about transforming the so volatile connections, the ‘weak ties’ into ‘strong ties’ (cf. Granovetter 1973), which become stronger the more intensively, reciprocally and emotionally is ‘invested’ in them. Communities and their direct relationships between the participants promise temporary stability, they promise points of reference in the midst of an ephemeral, transitory process without any lasting stability and guarantee. The munus would be the assurance to still be there, to read and agree, even when the boom may be over. Popularity, on the other hand, demands permanent performance without a break for the legitimation of the achieved status through renewed attention and approval, as confirmation in the fight against the decline in terms of favour of the public, ranking and algorithmic evaluation. Every success in attention is thus the starting point for the next one, and it must be, if the Instagame is to continue. It is a cynical game with complexity, because there are always more options than can be handled, there is always another account that one does not know, pictures that one has not clicked through yet—and when the feed is scrolled through so far that the message “You are up to date” appears, this is an illusion, because there is no ‘status’, new pictures and stories appear every second to make the

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game go on endlessly. Coming to an end, reading out a text passage, is impossible. Because the complexity never decreases; its horizon is constantly shifted and after each ‘accomplished’ content, the algorithm lets a new one appear. This horizon shift also applies to the literary contributions, which are followed by other, but similar ones. These conditions are unmistakably characterized by a neoliberal spirit. Instagram has installed a model of total competition in which everyone competes with everyone for the scarce good of attention: dogs against cats against outdoor clothing against sneakers against poetry or anything else that one does not even suspect to be there as well. The instragammable normal state is the attention struggle of all against all. In addition to the products, the users mainly assert themselves, their person, their experiences, feelings and thoughts. Many do this with the prospect of attention, of success and relevance, but it is no longer the 15 minutes of fame, which, in the face of fully developed mass media, were offered to everyone as an accidental, random, unplanned and unpredictable event. Instagram, on the other hand, offers the opportunity to work on one’s own fame 24/7, and, with rational hardness, to declare the vast majority of those who do not belong to the top accounts overall or at least to their sector, to underperformers who have not tried hard enough, delivered bad content or generally set the wrong strategy. Try harder. Instagram promises to satisfy needs that are transformed into desires by the platform. The general needs to express oneself and to creatively shape one’s experience of the world, to connect with others and to share something to the community correspond to the self-image of the company mentioned above. These needs, unlike desires, can be quenched. However, popularity, which is registered as attention, arouses desires—not needs, because this form

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of attention is not essential for life, even though it is often presented as such. Desires are unlimitedly scalable, because “for ‘equipment, gloss and visibility’ there are no natural limits” (Böhme 2016, p. 29). Such claims to visibility and resonance can be increased above all by the fact that everything appears in the mode of permanent comparison, which almost continuously detects a deficiency—every numerical value can be increased, because there is always something else that receives more attention. The limits of attention on the side of the recipients, like eg. stress and frantic behaviour, caused by an inflation of content and a corresponding decline in interest, are to be pushed back as far as possible. It is part of the platform’s strategy to turn users into behaviorist “automatons of desire” (Vogl 2010, pp. 43–44), because this competition becomes a process on its own, it becomes a self-reproducing system, autopoetic and automatic—because desire cannot be satisfied, it is arbitrarily scalable and therefore never ‘sufficient’. To write against the background of an infrastructure that is governed by these hard objective criteria and at the same time to turn one’s own interior outwards in order to speculate on empathy, compassion and approval is a contradictory undertaking that nevertheless succeeds again and again for the most successful Instapoets. Getting the right balance is not only important for the literary text itself, but also for its intermedial design. Just as brevity is a product of affordances, the effort to be authentic is a strategy on the one hand to authenticate the texts biographically and on the other hand to refer to motivations that go beyond media usage routines.

Brevity and Authenticity

When the hashtag #instapoetry is used for the first time, this happens neither in the name of pop, nor does the great glory of celebrated authors emanate from the earliest finds, which are now so far into digital oblivion that they can hardly be found anymore. However, the triumph of Instapoetry is mainly to be understood through the popularization successes of the platform Instagram, because many poets actually started on the blogging platform Tumblr. In 2012 and 2013, some young poets who had already been active on other platforms set out and moved their main place of publication to Instagram. Rupi Kaur and R.M. Drake switched over from Tumblr, tried themselves out partly parallel on Facebook and Twitter, but received the greatest resonance on Instagram, from whose rising popularity they benefited as much as from the speed of communication and the possibilities of reach increase through cross-connections. It is not only the close © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2023 N. Penke, Instapoetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66834-4_3

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interlocking of images and text, but also the connectivity options and the speed of the medium that make the cycle of publication and feedback take up much less time, especially if many more users are waiting to be recruited as an audience. The popularity growth has become possible through the inclusion of new followers in the community, which in turn correlates with the fact that Instagram has overtaken Tumblr in terms of monthly users in summer 2013 and has left it behind ever since. Selena Cotte has emphasized in her study that Tumblr was the decisive platform on which that style was developed, which, after its transfer as Instapoetry, has received much more attention—after the key actors such as Rupi Kaur and R.M. Drake have carried out the platform change. They adapted their image-text-design to the new conditions, but did not change it fundamentally. The “keying” as “tone and style of communication” (Shifman 2014, p. 40) has remained the same. However, both have adopted very different presentation and communication methods. While Kaur still reacted to every comment on her now deleted Tumblr profile, her Instagram behavior is characterized by increasingly communication renunciation and ever stronger one-sidedness; Drake, on the other hand, interacts with his followers, refers to their linkings and maintains a deliberately cordial exchange. However, Drake is far less political figure than Kaur, who, with increasing popularity, has become a representative voice for those who have to struggle with oppression, marginalization and trauma (Pâquet 2019, p. 298). Kaur’s primary attention-grabbing device for her person and her texts was, however, the so-called “menstruation-themed photo series” (see Saul 2015) in March 2015. This shows, among other things, Kaur in a blood-stained nightgown, which led to conflicts with the platform’s censorship regulations, sparked a debate and received international attention. An act of female self-assertion against

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regressive prudery, which created visibility and discursive connections. Kaur’s contributions increased numerically and reached over 100,000 likes per posting for the first time. From her self-published poetry book milk and honey (2014), more than 15,000 copies were sold in a short time, which led to a contract with Andrews McMeel Publishing, where the book was published in a revised version in October 2015 and distributed internationally. As early as 07.10.2015, Kaur reports in a posting that the first edition is already sold out in many places and thanks for this “power of the people” with a text-image combination: “It took a community to get here—thank you” (see Fig. 8), in the middle of which a (honey) bee is pictured. Already in her early Instagram˗time Kaur developed a coherent aesthetics of her profile, which has been maintained to this day: text and selfie / portrait alternate regularly as posting. Public appearances or exchanges with other celebrities, on the other hand, provide material for the stories, in which, among other things, the cooperation with the actress Emma Watson also played a role, who invited Kaur in August 2018 to the “Intersectional Feminist Bi-monthly Book Club” Our Shared Shelf and talked to her about literature and feminism. Kaur’s short video contribution (https://www.instagram.com/p/BmtOsO3g39s/) to this event was viewed over 1.3 million times on Instagram. Kaur’s path to great popularity and million-selling poetry books is the leading fantasy of Instapoetry, a fairytale success that tells the unlikely story of a young woman who, through her belief in herself and her persistent work and investment in her writing, has made her way to the top—as an individual case, which is nevertheless intended to prove that everyone can make it. The popularity of Instagram encourages a change of platform, but not a change in the text˗image˗strategies. About Rupi Kaur’s medial position, Cotte writes: “[S]he has shaped Instagram poetry, but she was shaped by Tumblr.” (Cotte 2020, p. 77).

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Many of the text contributions declared as poetry on Instagram are not only based on image files, but are also images in the sense that they contain graphic elements or are even designed predominantly graphically, so that the text is only one element among several. The distinction between digital literature and digital art is not always clear. It can be made with Roberto Simanowski, who considers a genre distinction between literature and art possible to the extent “whether the text is still significant and perceptible as a linguistic phenomenon in a given phenomenon. This justifies speaking of ‘digital literature’. If the text is merely a visual object within an installation or interaction, however, it is to be referred to as ‘digital art’.” (Simanowski 2009, p. 623) The shift into the field of digital art is, however, forced by the company and by the technical changes carried out. Through the ‘Story’ and ‘Reel’ formats, two functions have been introduced that allow moving images such as videos, gifs and animations. In particular, the focus is increasingly shifting to the video functions through the competition with the Chinese company ByteDance and its app TikTok—and promoted by algorithmic prioritization. Static texts do not gain anything if they are published in these formats, except that they are given a very specific temporal dimension, because as a story they appear only for a temporary duration. Consequences of this are spoken texts, animated attachments and sequential texts that display words and verses one after the other. In the story, however, the continuous self-thematization is continued pictorially, not as a coherent narrative, but in the “innumerable variety of individual stories (in the sense of stories )” (Koschorke 2012, p. 30) [Koschorke speaks of “stories ” as a special format of the more general “Geschichten”, author’s note]. At the level of the profile as a coherent structure, the individual postings can be aggregated to form a constantly expanding narrative. However,

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only some of the stories can be integrated permanently into the profile as so-called ‘highlights’. This distinction may concern more the question of disciplinary competence, less the practice of production and reception, because for producers as well as recipients it is self-evident that Instapoetry appears as a combination of text(s) and image(s), in which the interplay of the different elements can be dissolved one-sidedly only in the rarest cases. Image-texts or text-images, which cannot be had without duality. These combinations, as I said, did not arise with Instagram, they looked similar on Tumblr. Here, as there, it is a digital literature that was not digitized, but only came into being under the given new possibilities, so they are equally “born digital” (Winko 2016, p. 4). “Born digital” also means that possibilities such as consequences of digitalization are already included in the production of content and its formal design, so they do not behave subsequently to digitalization, but are shaped integral by this. Tumblrpoetry and Instapoetry are therefore genuinely new as such digital literatures. With both it is platform literature, which is shaped by a certain design of the digital, but hardly has any references to other forms of digital literature. These form of poetry may take over functions of sketchbooks and notebooks, poetry albums or advice books, they may play here and there with telegram style or Dada—this is not constitutive for their general forms and procedures. Instapoetry is a (pop) phenomenon without being part of any “retromania” (Simon Reynolds), which nostalgically looks back to past decades, but is also genuinely new in the sense that it makes enthusiastic use of the offer of free publicity with great reach to create ‘new’ things. It differs from other, especially earlier forms of digital literature in that the unlimited public is only a few finger movements away—purchased in exchange for the problem that every content is always in competition

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with countless others, with which one competes for attention, because also the number of users is without historical precedent. Never before has the possibility been greater to publish every casual note or every brief thought—and never before has so much text been brought together in such a short time to form a conglomerate. Instapoetry is therefore, especially in the permanent exhibition of its literariness—“poetry” dominates the cosmos of relevant hashtags—a new form under new media conditions, which renegotiates and develops its production methods, attention economies and public practices again and again, but always declares them to be poetry. It must not fall into the background that it is a literary phenomenon that is exhibited as such by its producers again and again despite all the images. A form of poetry that is immediately (instantaneously ) set in scene and in front of an audience. Instantaneity thus denotes the practice of publication; a few finger movements and the photo of a text is in the world. It can now be retrieved again and again, featured in the story, shared or reposted at a later time. Instantaneity also denotes the paratextual practice that makes every text, no matter how short and visible—as audible ‘unlyrical’—a contribution to poetry: through the performative act of attribution. What publishers do with books (and what does not always coincide with the will of their authors) is left to each and every instapoet: The unlimited possibilities of paratextual positioning via the text field and the use of hashtags, tagging oneself and one’s texts in several, perhaps completely different contexts with a simple #. What this general poetry is supposed to be in particular is confirmed with each post anew—it comprises traditional forms such as sonnets and haikus as well as the ‘free verses’ that are open to arbitrariness, but also the sentences and sayings referred to as quotes or thoughts. In its entirety, Instapoetry comprises a great formal breadth that

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does not lag behind in terms of content diversity. The cluster term ‘Instapoetry’ is therefore used with a tremendous capacity for integration because it is neither normatively defined nor restricted in its applicability by any external or internal instance. The tendency towards shorter contributions is a product of this attention-economic situation. These contributions thus not only follow “the communicative imperative” (Jäger 2014, p. 21) of modernity as such, but above all the affordances of medium and usage routines, because “a work [must] function immediately in the market and media dispositif of our days” (Baßler/Drügh 2021, p. 99). “Waiting,” says Byung-Chul Han, “does not belong to the digital habitus.” (Han 2013, p. 36) It can be seen time and again that shorter contributions usually receive the greatest resonance (cf. Penke 2019, p. 473)—the shorter a text by the popular Instapoets is, the more likes it receives, is commented on more often and forwarded. This has consequences for the form, in that a certain measure is introduced. Here too, a reference can be made to the ‘normalization power’ of pop music, namely in analogy to the 3-minute format, which has proven to be the best for radio and 7″ singles. Complicated and more extensive forms therefore have it—just like ‘too long’ songs—more difficult. On Instagram, ‘length’ has quantitative disadvantages. Longer texts cannot be quickly consumed and positively evaluated, but need more time, which in turn leads to fewer likes and comments. Whoever acts contrary to this primacy of brevity therefore needs a greater effort to compensate for the disadvantages, for example through increased communication with other users. But if, with the platforms, “the embedding of all social relations in the so-called ‘ecosystem’ of digital capitalism” (Vogl 2021, p. 116) is carried out, then it is only logical to also adopt new literary forms that adapt to this changed situation.

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Extensive forms are an objective disadvantage in the fight for attention. Instapoetry is therefore not only determined by the normality of the digital, but has incorporated the given conditions of Instagram in particular: The form obeys the affordance. Instagram’s business model is aimed at bringing the finite resource of time as close as possible to the capacitive limits of human perception in order to ‘process’ as much input as possible, which is registered, liked or shared, in order to generate data about data. The immediacy also corresponds to the ideal of automatic updating, because neither the publication of one’s own contributions, nor their perception, evaluation or feedback require more than a few seconds. It is about approximations to a minimum of time expenditure, which makes the mass of what can be observed all the greater. The counter-test feels weird. Try to linger for ten minutes or more in front of an Instagram image, read an Instapoem over and over again— and resist the temptation to scroll further. Speed and abundance provoke a break with traditional literary reading habits, which are practiced in school and university. Under these conditions, Instapoetry is a poetry of immediate presence. An extremely short literature in the face of a limited time horizon, which at the same time appears in a feed that is able to update the new one second by second in almost infinite variety. The feed resembles a conveyor belt driven by finger movements, which constantly passes contributions of very different kinds for second-fast evaluation and registers what catches and what does not. The texts of Instapoetry are mostly written with regard to this specific medium as well as the reading and evaluation practices. The result is a comprehensive transformation of poetical writing. This applies on the one hand to the medium-specificity in technical terms, from which the sketched usage routines have arisen, but on the other hand also to the social component. While

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diaries and notebooks are usually written according to the principle of mihi ipsi scripsi (“I wrote it for myself ”, Friedrich Nietzsche), generally accessible platforms such as Instagram tempt this principle, they tempt to (written) self-exposure in front of an incalculable audience. Every experience, every feeling can be articulated—and a lot is articulated when you scroll through the painful confessions. The question then arises as to when a text is sufficiently qualified to be declared a poem and to count as “proper” literature. On January 11, 2016, the Austrian author Stefanie Sargnagel, who first came to public attention on Facebook and only later made Instagram one of her communication media, without becoming an Instapoet there, asks: “Ab wann / geht eigentlich / 1 Text / als Gedicht / durch?” (Sargnagel 2017, p. 113) [“From when / does / 1 text / actually pass / as a poem?”] Concise definitions usually set a certain focus, which in turn either severely limits the reach of these definitions or makes them particularly comprehensive. If we look at some prominent definitions, then there is no doubt that we are dealing with forms of (lyric) poetry in Instapoetry. Achim Hölter considers the context to be decisive, because “a poem rarely comes alone; the formal environment of lyrical texts is mostly lyrical texts” (Hölter 2016, p. 107). This “formal environment” is confirmed a thousand times over in the form of similar texts in the profile structure or under the numerous hashtags. Dieter Lamping, on the other hand, defines the poem as “a monologue in verses” (Lamping 2000, p. 63), thus emphasizing a monological text status, which stands in “absolute speech as opposed to situational speech” (Fricke/Stocker 2000, p. 499). The absoluteness of the monologue is only partially given in many contributions to Instapoetry. In connection with other texts by the same author or under a certain hashtag, they

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stand in structural relationships that exceed monologue and individual speech, that switch to polyphonic speech or that start anew time and again in close connection to their own person. It is also the situational context that concretizes texts, contextualizes them and makes them comprehensible ad hoc. Texts such as those posted by @ Ringbahnpoesie (Fig. 2) are to be understood as situational speech, short texts from the Berlin public transport and its passengers, which form a kind of “ubiquitous literature” (Schulze 2020), which comprises various text forms between illustrative extended sentences, short dialogues and occasional poems, such as the “slaughterhouse haiku” from January 12, 2020. In addition to form, rhythm, sound, and performative elements, the address of absentees is also a possible determination that can be “invoked” by the poem. Jonathan Culler speaks of an “invocation of absent or nonhuman addresses” (Culler 2015, p. 8), which, however, is carried out in a paradoxical distribution of roles, a “triangulated address” (ibid.): The audience is addressed in that it is identified as something else in the address—as God, natural force, lover,

Fig. 2  @ringbahnpoesie, 12.01.2020

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father, mother or child. However, the illustration does not make us the addressed “you”, but delegates this speech to two foxes that perform what the three lines address. Admittedly, this example and the account behind it are an exception. Context-related, as already hinted at, it can mean even more if the situation is a continuous speech context that is carried out over the account. The impression of the continued speech, that is, each new text is attributed again and again to the same speaking subject, is due to the close link between author and text, between life and (literary) work. Despite the literary sublimation, the coupling of person and poem claims authenticity. A form of authenticity that can be understood as “the identity of an individual with itself ” (Bauer 2018, p. 71). The basic question of every poem interpretation “Who speaks?” Is thus answered instantaneously—this is usually the person who can be seen in the profile picture or, if not pictured, at least as xyz_thePoet or similar behind the account name. If, when reading and analyzing, it is a matter of reconstructing the situation and motives of the speaking instance, working out rhythm and sound patterns, intertextual relationships (i.e. direct text references to other poems as well as higher-level references to genre [which is supposed to designate ‘Gattung’ and ‘Genre’, general form and more specific content setup, author's note]), then texts for the understanding of which all this is not necessary, are unconditionally comprehensible, almost consumable, because there is hardly any irritation and the resulting delay in understanding. These are texts that can be understood easily after the first reading, which are getting by the elements that could make lyrical texts difficult in general. Different isotope levels, unknown metaphors, ellipses and jumps, and the not always easy to clarify question of who or what is articulated there, from which perspective, against which background about which impressions

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or events are spoken. The simplicity of Instapoetry is mainly due to this clarity—who speaks is clear, because it is understood as hardly disguised speech of that individual who gives the account name and/or face. A poetic distance between the poet and the poem is usually avoided. The “authentic” work establishes a “univocal relation between artist and work”, so that the work appears as an “unadulterated expression of the true self ” (Bauer 2018, p. 70). In a survey in the stories of @adorawilliamspoetry (Fig. 3), which asked about the best subject of Instapoetry,

Fig. 3  @adorawilliamspoetry, survey in the story, 16.06.2021

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this focus was confirmed with one hundred percent, which should treat “The Self ”, the own I. The possible W-questions then do not arise at all. Such authentication is carried out via the person who has published or—as in analogy to pop music, performed live—also experienced what they have published, or at least so credibly embodied that neither fiction signals are sent out nor doubts arise. Such a framed text appears as an unbroken “I”-statement, which means a radical rejection of ambivalence and ambiguity. With this, Instapoetry participates in a much broader trend—or benefits greatly from the fact that corresponding expectations of cultural products of different kinds have already been set: a “unambiguous world”, which the German scholar Thomas Bauer has described. Bauer notes a widespread decline in ambiguity tolerance, which leads to the fact that diversity and complexity are no longer experienced as enrichment, which has particularly serious consequences for the arts. “In many areas of life—not just in religion,” says Bauer, “offers appear attractive that promise liberation from the inescapable ambiguity of the world.” (Bauer 2018, p. 30) Bauer attributes this to the global context of the “capitalist economy”, because this requires “less the autonomous than the authentic subject. The authentic subject finds its fulfillment in the quenching of its authentic needs in consumption. Therefore, what applies to chocolate bars must also apply to art. Even art that is to withstand the authentic subject must be consumable art. Art that could lead to long-term thinking, hours of contemplation, or even a lifetime of engagement with a work is not welcome. Therefore, art that appears to be critical, even capitalism-critical at first glance, is ultimately only affirmative, namely when it serves the authenticity discourse.” (Ibid., p. 68)

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Although Bauer does not mention Instagram and Instapoetry anywhere in his book, his observations can still be transferred, because they describe the starting conditions for Instagrammism and the neoliberal self(ie) gaze from another perspective. The fact that authenticity is dealt with as the “highest ideal” (ibid., p. 68) of successful Instapoetry is confirmed by the accounts of Rupi Kaur, R.M. Drake and Yrsa Daley-Ward. The pretending of truthfulness is necessary, perhaps it is even the most important rhetorical gesture to bridge the actual anonymity and distance of author and audience, to create those impressions of direct, almost intimate connection. The “authenticity expectation” is therefore so relevant because it “creates a minimum of trust” (Stalder 2021, p. 142) by bringing to bear an “authentic self ” that turns its inner world inside out, not essentialist but performative in front of the eyes of the many followers. The introspection no longer aims at the “self-knowledge” but at the continuous “self-motivation” (ibid., p. 143). The motivation refers above all to what is to be overcome as a trauma. Authenticity and authenticity claim also form the phalanx in the performative fight against the widespread prejudice that everything that is spread via social media in general and Instagram in particular is not only digitally processed, but also faked and staged, that neither pictures nor contents correspond to reality. With the indication that this is not always and everywhere the case, not a few Instapoets work to refute the verdict that everything is inauthentic and unreal in several ways with the continuous assurance of their authenticity. This also applies to the materiality of poetry and writing, which are also provided with the attribute of authenticity. Instapoetry is a digital literature that does not need but still uses analogue carrier media and often exhibits its materiality. It is a nostalgic “vintage aesthetics” (Pâquet

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2019, p. 299), which uses writing utensils and materials that carry the index of what is technologically past. Not only in the profiles of the leading Instapoets are numerous authenticity signals to be found, which point to the use of (allegedly) non-digital materials and media, but it is almost a trademark of many authors of Instapoetry, to find and cultivate their own writing material style (Fig. 4). Notebooks, various colors used and hand-drawn pictures in front of changing papers, but above all the hands act as authenticity signals that prove the origin of the respective text in an extra-digital setting. It was really written, painted and felt as the text and illustration express it. Robert Marcias, alias R.M. Drake (@rmdrk), also repeatedly exhibits his writing instruments and materials. With over 2.8 million followers on the basis of over 7100 posts (as of June 2022), he is one of the most popular Instapoets. After he gave up using filters, his short texts were often accompanied by drawings, which mainly show human faces and bodies, sometimes individually, sometimes in pairs, framing his texts. The photos from his “middle phase” repeatedly contain decorative image elements such as roses, teacups and coffee cups, floorboards or pets, which sometimes appear in front of the background of beach or garden scenes. These are motifs with which Drake initially built on the image language of the Bookstagram and shelfie communities (cf. Schneider 2018), whose aesthetic affinity to the non-digital his photos share. This nostalgic return is particularly expressed when the proximity to the analogue photography is sought and imitated. Drake repeatedly makes (refracted) references to the aesthetics of Polaroid photos, he also repeatedly posts photos of Polaroid cameras (e.g. on 30.05.2018). The actually obsolete is revived, not as a nostalgic artifact, but as one that is still in use, as evidence of a timeless quality. This also applies to his (alleged) writing instrument.

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Fig. 4  @thetypewriterdaily, Postings 26.02.–26.03.2019

On 29.11.2013 he posts the picture of a Royal typewriter from the 1940s, which is also in the center of his postings

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on 10.12. and 11.12.2013. On 20.01.2014 he shows a Rover 5000 Comfort Matic from the 1970s, which is also supposed to be used by him. Unlike Rupi Kaur, Drake almost constantly strives for such non-digital objects, which he stages for his followers in combination with his texts. Since 2021, however, all new texts by Drake are designed in a strictly minimalist way and consist only of black text on a white background. Drake is not the only one who has put typewriters in the focus of the stagings of his writing, also with other prominent Instapoets like Christopher Poindexter, JM Storm, J. Iron Word, MvDarkLight or The Poetry Bandit typewriter˗retro˗aesthetics are cultivated. This strategy, which aims to not only achieve authenticity effects through forced “‘unpretentious’ representations” (Gamper/ Mayer 2017, p. 16), but also to reduce the distance between oneself and one’s audience, seems to be successful even when Instapoets like Drake remain almost completely invisible. But only in the direct connection with the person writing can the authentication actually become credible, because images of typewriters, pens and calligraphies as well as the (apparently) organic-based backgrounds, the notebooks, parchment, coarse-fibered wallpaper or memos can also be used as backgrounds for the text to be arranged above them. An impressive handwriting can be imitated technically, a battered wall can come from a stock photo—the distinction is not only impossible, but it becomes obsolete, because neither a material test can be carried out, nor questions like this weigh in at all. If it is about the effect and the associations that are triggered by such a vintage aesthetics, but not about the critical examination to what extent an Instapoem is composed of which elements, then authenticity effects dominate, which open up a reference space that only has to meet the condition

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of not being able to be seen through by untrained eyes as fictitious. The claim to authenticity is important in another respect. Whoever claims authenticity presents his own behavior as self-determined and thus signals that he is not oriented towards the wishes or even instructions of others, but only obeys his own will. Authenticity claims a self-efficacy in the face of medial determination, which has to be performed vehemently in the interplay with the affordance character of platform and community, because it is subject to so many constraints. In addition, self-efficacy is also relevant in relation to the content of abuse, loss, fear or depression, the stigma and lethargy of which are challenged by the fact that the speaking, ‘poetic I’ rises from its silence. The “success story” (Saraswati 2021, p. 7) is characterized precisely by this activation, the incessant effort to assert oneself against trauma and stigmata and thus to send out ‘empowering’ signals. The connection between autonomy and work, however, also arises in a completely different context. This concerns the book, the printed book as a material fact, which has also become an increasingly important part of the posted content of leading Instapoets as a result of print publications (Fig. 5). The printed book is not a volte of a new Luddism directed against the growing dominance of tablets and smartphones, but is determined both economically and by the desire for more independence. Production-wise, it is, in addition to the recursive loops of the potentially infinite process of posting, posting-references in the story, repostings of one’s own earlier postings and those of others referring to it, the cover of the book publication, which promises stability on the side of the authors. And it is an escape from Instagram’s ‘free culture’. The unstable publication as a posting can of course also be secured by screenshots, which arise due to the

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Fig. 5  Book cover, from left to right and top to bottom: Rupi Kaur, Caroline Kaufman, R.M. Drake, Atticus, Clara Louise, Nikita Gill, Lang Leav

individual preferences of the users, but the switch to the medium of the book is a security from which both sides can benefit. Not only authors, who derive direct monetary income from sales, but also readers gain the security that their favorite texts will remain permanently. That it can look different without a book quickly shows the example of Nayyirah Waheed, who was declared “perhaps the most famous poet on Instagram” in 2017 (Henderson 2017). Her account, which at times had almost a million followers, became increasingly deserted and eventually only showed advertising, but the poems were gone. The account (@nayyirah.waheed) has since been deleted. Waheed’s texts circulate, as the hashtag #nayyirahwaheed shows, in large numbers (01/2022: over 92,000 posts), but they are fixed in definitive versions in the two volumes salt. (2013) and Nejma (2014), which were published as

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self-publications via CreateSpace, today part of Amazon, and are still distributed by the mail-order company. If the book promises independence from a platform, Waheed’s strategy, however, leads to the entanglement of another, the proprietary market on Amazon. Other Instapoets, on the other hand, publish with Andrews McMeel Publishing; in addition to Rupi Kaur, among others, Diego Perez (@yung_pueblo, 1.9 million followers) and Amanda Lovelace (@ladybookmad, 105,000 followers). The book as a physical medium is considered to be of lasting value and culturally traditional, but it is also the most direct way to monetize one’s own success in terms of secondary products (T-shirts, posters, stickers, etc.) in addition to the sale of books. This is, above all, if Instapoetry is taken seriously as literature, an indicator of success in social media, which can also be measured by the fact that the leap to traditional mass media and/ or other economically exploitable capital forms succeeds (cf. Shifman 2014, p. 107). The book therefore represents a qualitative leap on the basis of quantitative success. In addition, it promises deceleration as a relief from the routines of the platform. This is exemplified, among other things, by the handgeschriebenVerlag which combines the claim to make “words tangible” and “conserve poetry” with “deceleration, for taking a deep breath and being real” (cf. https://handgeschrieben-verlag.com/). However, the decisive argument for the book is the autonomy from the platform and, associated with it, the independence from the respective preferences of the algorithm and the potential innovations of the operator. The book serves to preserve the “work”, which is highly precarious as long as it only exists in the account. An account can not only be hacked, but also interventions by the operator in the form of deletions of individual posts, the restriction of access and certain functions are possible,

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such as the ‘shadow ban’, which can drastically reduce the visibility of the account after the use of blocked hashtags, the accusation or actual use of bots, or due to the reporting of “inappropriate” content. Also the temporary blocking or permanent deletion of the entire account are possible. The literary “work” would disappear in the event of blocking or deletion. This also applies to the number of followers, which can be understood as a form of incorporated popularity, but which is primarily attributed to the account on the platform and therefore not transferable. Naji has pointed out how precarious some forms of digital literature are, which would cease to exist through the shutdown of operating systems or platforms (Naji 2021, p. 6). The book is therefore a guarantee of an analogue constancy towards digital fluidity. The book conserves the content independent of the platform. In turn, such image-and-text-combinations are advantageous which can be printed without distinction, that is without loss of certain elements and functions. In any case, the open process is halted, the text environment (digital paratext ) is cut off with the exception of illustrations and framing. In the book, the visible feedback mechanisms disappear: The hearts, likes and comments do not go with it. The book therefore makes it possible to adopt a different reception attitude—or even forces it—which is not limited to the few seconds that are not constantly provoked by a multitude of other contributions by numbers and comments, which are always within the display, for distraction or offsetting, but give time to stay on one page and let the respective poems work on themselves, but also in the context of a “work”-structure. The poems also become worklike by the fixation of a sequence and overall composition, which create temporal sequences that make origins and developments clear, which were not present in the order of the texts in the profile. Rupi Kaur’s books make this

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clear. Milk and Honey (2014) is divided into four chapters, which, based on hurting, loving, breaking and healing, deal with the consequences of the initial injuries, in order to finally bring the positive self-experience and awareness of the sensitive I to an optimistic end, which is marked by “healing” and promises an overcoming of the traumatic experiences. A survival story that can provide comfort. Her second book Sun and her Flowers (2017) goes through a similar processual development with Wilting, Falling, R ooting, Rising and Blooming. Kaur’s volumes are therefore more than just arbitrary collections of poems that were already available digitally, but each a new, own work— even if, as many of the euphoric or annihilating reviews on the rating platform Goodreads indicate, rarely read and evaluated without reference to Kaur’s Instagram activity. This applies to both the accusations of superficiality and formlessness as well as the emotional attachment that the texts trigger in the enthusiasm of many readers. Kaur’s book is doing very well overall, it gets a rating of 4.03 (out of 5.0 possible) stars, 485,077 ratings and 33,886 reviews (as of January 2022). As top reviews, mainly those come to the fore which have caused the most reactions, that is, which have been rated or commented on themselves. Alafiya asks on 03.02.2017 in verse form: “So if I write my review like this will it automatically become poetry?” (Alafiya 2017)

It is striking that the reviews with the highest approval ratings are decidedly negative and only give one or two stars. They wonder about the form that appears to them to be arbitrary, and are perplexed by the highly emotional

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confessions. Could this type of poetry stand up to a quality comparison with Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson? The majority of the enthusiastic five-star reviews, on the other hand, are brief and usually do without analysis and justification. On behalf of the many who feel emotionally touched and are therefore extremely excited about Kaur’s poetry, user Thomas writes on 18.10.2015: “milk and honey tore through my analytical mind and burrowed deep into my ultra-sensitive soul. It slayed all my emotions, my feminist desires, and my love for vulnerable writing. I may not know a lot about poetry, but I do know a decent amount about feelings, and Rupi Kaur brought all my feelings tumbling out with this gorgeous collection of poems. She writes about love and loss, trauma, and femininity—subjects that I so happen to adore.” (Thomas 2015) The expertise to properly assess the book and its content does not come from dealing with poems, but from knowledge of feelings. Sensitivity instead of analysis, emotional harmony instead of dissection characterizes this approach. Therefore, those who take this mode belong to the community, because their central reference attributes are emotions, the resonance of which decides on the belonging to the ‘community of feeling’. Regardless of which of the aspects mentioned one takes into account, the result is the image of a highly externally determined, that is, heteronomous poetry, which is associated with a number of very concrete and strong purposes. This inevitably results in texts that are determined by a strong pragmatic component. In the sense of strict definitions, for example by Roman Jakobson, wide parts of the Instapoetry would not be poetic in the narrower sense at all, because it is not the self-referential, literature-referring language that is at the center, but rather the relationships between mediality, aesthetics, audience, and the respective referecnes to the mentioned problems that are

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always changing. It is about accountability, about identifying statements and people. Understandability and unambiguity are therefore important both for the existence in the general fight for attention and for the content, which should be communicated as clearly and authentically as possible without irritation. Trigger warnings and content notes, as used, for example, by Nikita Gill (@nikita˗gill), have the effect of such strong univocality in addition to the warning (Fig. 6). The reference to “mentions of eating disorders, fatphobia” on the content page creates clarity, because the adjacent text is to address eating disorders and hatred of obese people. The weight mentioned in the title is thus limited to its physical component alone. There is no ‘mystery’ about what is presented in a scene or what lies unspoken behind it, but the experience of abuse, fear or illness is given priority in the text. This warning function, which is sometimes polemically ridiculed as oversensitivity, but does something else if one does not have to speculate about what has happened or the exact event: the form is

Fig. 6  @nikita˗gill, What I Weigh, 16.07.2021

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given even more importance and greater attention. This also includes the possible distinctions in which mode one can begin something with the texts as texts. If they are mainly or exclusively received as offers for empathy, for emotional identification and confirmation, or can the ‘philological spirit’, which might feel elaborated, also find something in them with a sense of style and a will to form criticism, which is considered worthy of attention and occupation. However, many texts also do not want to be read in such a second, more “professional” way, in which only an aesthetic reception mode is taken. Even if Nikita Gill attributes importance to the form, she primarily acts as a representative of a kind of ‘discourse poetry’ that seeks its connections not in aesthetic traditions, but in current debates. “I Weigh” began as a social media post and developed into a mental health movement to which Gill docks onto with her texts, whose positions and goals she carries further with her  very own  discourse-poetry. Although these texts are assigned a very specific function, their marking as literary is maintained by form and epitext.

Emotional Community, Self-care, Healing

Instapoetry is generated through the interplay of production and reception. Authentic expression of emotions on the one hand, which is authenticated by the person and their physicality, on the other hand a public which willingly accepts, confirms and communitises around these offers. Since neither the “circulation of social energy” (Greenblatt 1988, p. 19) nor the interest has so far declined despite the high circulation speed, the phenomenon of Instapoetry is stable. Shared collective dreams, desires, fears and the “intensities of experience” (ibid.) associated with them constitute a center to which the participants can relate. One condition for this to succeed is the mutual confirmation of text and its intended statement by an audience. This requires that texts are designed on the production side in such a way that they can experience the intended effect on the reception side—an intention must be designed (and often even openly displayed) so that it is © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2023 N. Penke, Instapoetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66834-4_4

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clear what it is about and which type of feeling addressed is the right one. Hashtags play an important role in disambiguation. Empathy and sympathy aim at identification with the written, a practice of identificatory reading or reception is the result. With the affective intentionality, an affective poetology must go hand in hand, a knowledge of the arsenal of image-technical and textual possibilities in order to be able to achieve certain effects. This can be a general interest (#interesting), but stronger still are longing, euphoria and empathy as suitable triggers for an emotional attachment. The task is to achieve the feat of giving everyone the impression of being addressed as an individual in their individual emotional constitution and at the same time to participate in (the fiction) of the same feeling as many, almost all others. The confirmation for this is provided by the countless hearts and emojis in the comment columns, which are supplemented by personal confessions as they can also be found in the reviews on Goodreads and Amazon—they give the decided emphasis that a poem or poet exactly express “what we all feel” (Hodgkinson 2019). The Like button, but above all the comment sections, are “where affect (love, compassion, grief, enthusiasm, desire) is a guarantee of Being” (Barthes 1981, 113). However, this feedback is not the exception, but, if you look through the comment sections under many different Instapoems, the rule. It is not one poem that fills and transcends one’s own experiences and life situations with meaning, but it is the many texts that express negative experiences and optimistic perspectives in persistence, which are confirmed in the same way over and over again. Texts, especially poems, that are oriented towards such affective confirmation, however, lead to inflation—how often can one experience an emotional reaction in similar forms without this reaction losing its intensity and the

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communication about these feelings losing credibility? This feedback can only be maintained in the long term within a collective practice, in routines of social interaction, which takes place in the awareness of a broad participation. It is not only the emphatic feedback to the one author of a certain poem, but at the same time and perhaps even first and foremost a message to the community, to like-minded people, to those who feel the same way, who articulate their affective resonance in the same way. “What we all feel” as a single statement is an empty claim, in the multitude of likes and confirming comments it only gains its validity. Thus, the feedback becomes an important resource of emotional support (cf. Curwood/Kovalik 2019, p. 191). A style community is created and maintaned, that is not characterized by common surface distinctions (cf. Hecken), but on similar forms of perception, evaluation and judgment, on a shared “mode” (Baßler/Drügh 2021, p. 71). What is constituted on this basis can be understood as an emotional community, as a digital-literary version of an affective community, as Emma Hutchison has described it. Such communities are constituted by collectively shared forms of feeling, through shared patterns of emotional meaning and understanding. The main condition for this is that one’s own feelings are communicated and that the corresponding community is performatively produced or maintained through their circulation. This “distinctive ‘affective’ type of community” (ibid.) exist in an interplay of individual confession and collective confirmation. This results in two things: On the one hand, time, attention and commitment must be continuously invested in such communities, as they otherwise evaporate. They are not solid structures with permanent obligations like clubs and institutions, but only exist as long as people

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interact in their structures and thus maintain them. On the other hand, such a temporary community is difficult to get a grip on if only sporadic sightings of individual accounts and posts are made. This is especially noticeable on the part of the critics of Instapoetry when speaking about the phenomenon as a whole, which prioritizes the text and does not take anything else into account. Such affective communities and their codes resemble communizations in the sign of pop in that the perspectives from the inside and from the outside differ significantly, namely in that the essential qualities and functions cannot be seen from the outside at all. This confirms that the meanings in pop “can only be accessed through membership in (or interpretation of ) the relevant community” (Diederichsen 1999, p. 278) and not through any unspecifically general experiences. It is not about any unspecifically general experiences, but, as the comparative analysis shows, above all about traumas and their productive overcoming. A large number of poems and other short texts can be found on various mental illnesses, fears, loss, abuse and other violence experiences that are directly linked to the person who not only wrote the text, but speaks through it. A variety of literature based on autobiographical foundation, similar to what is known in the field of the novel as misery or trauma porn—the experiences of one’s own suffering are mercilessly and, at times, painfully detailed, but allow for “consolation in the misfortune of others” (Engelmeier 2021, p. 34), who are also doing bad or even much worse than oneself. This applies to Rupi Kaur, but also to many less well-known poets, whose intertwining of text and personal experience, such as that of Kris Coffield (@kriscoffieldpoetry), is extremely disturbing. The central reference of these traumas is again the body. Where words and allegorical drawings claim to represent

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the real inner life, photos and selfies show the seat and origin of these feelings and thoughts, which in turn authenticates what is more than just a rhetorical gesture. Drawing on Yuval Noah Harari, a shift or modification of the locus of speech can be observed here. Instead of the detached eyewitness testimony of an observing subject (as eye˗witnessing ), these Instapoets take on another locus of speech in order to represent what they have experienced with their own bodies and thus claim a form of ‘flesh˗witnessing’, which is more difficult to communicate intersubjectively, but which can claim representation in its sought-after individual generality (cf. Harari 2009). The body as a witness, the traces of whose mutilation are still recognizable and tangible, is again and again at the center of instapoetic poems. Rupi Kaur is paradigmatic again, whose texts are often accompanied by stylized drawings of mostly female human bodies, from breast, back and shoulder parts or hands. Her very first poem from November 18, 2013 is such a document of ‘flesh-witnessing’, in which the Instapoetry has one of its ‘mythical’ starting points (Fig. 7). Not only the clearly recognizable change of media of the poem “you trace the bruises on your ribs” is relevant, it already anticipates much of what is to become typical for her further writing: I-You-relationships, addressed from a mostly female-coded voice to a male counterpart (father, ex-partner) who is responsible for the violence experiences from which the poem speaks as a “witness of the body”—the bruises are there and can be empathized. The ‘you’ in this poem is also directed as an imperative to a general ‘you’ that is addressed in order to empathize with one’s own bodily impairments. This opening, like many of Kaur’s other poems, speaks of lost futures and betrayed hopes, instead of which the ghosts of the past have come in the form of violent fathers or (ex-)partners who have

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Abb. 7  @rupikaur_, you trace the bruises on your ribs, 18.11.2013

never disappeared or continue to exist as depressions because they are to blame for the disappointments of life and the betrayal of the lost options. But this burden is to

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be overcome by a positive mental attitude—namely now, immediately, the time is now, and every moment the work on the traumas can be newly begun or continued. Not only Kaur’s poems emphatically proclaim that new beginning, reversal and positive confirmation are possible here and now. But the existential heaviness also presupposes that the internal communication is unbroken, many topics cannot tolerate the usual mockery or ironic distance. Only against the background of such a common agreement, a common ground of the community, it can be understood that a posting like Kaur’s from 7 October 2015 is perceived as a collective success and confirmation of the (affective) community and is liked by many, although the occasion is a commercial success. This is due to the collective action of the community, but primarily benefits the author alone. The community thus also includes the simple semantics of the customers and buyers who have made this success possible to a large extent, without being explicitly mentioned in the emphatic speech of community as a “family” (Fig. 8). The boundaries between helpful self-disclosure and oversharing are fluid. There is a tendency to disclose more and more intimate information in order to counter routine and interest inflation. Instapoetry lives to a not insignificant extent on the fact that the most personal and traumatic experiences are communicated publicly—forms of abuse up to rape, mental and physical illness, special fears and concrete losses—all this is communicated many thousands, if not millions of times. Texts and images that appear to be ‘body shots’ can only be fully understood by those who have been similarly struck and injured. ‘Understanding’ is suspended by empathy. In this context, the empowerment of the poems can also be understood, which, in contrast to the traumatizing experiences (ex positivo, so to speak), articulate hopes and

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Fig. 8  @rupikaur_, 07.10.2015

encourage individual and collective mindfulness and care. Legitimization phrases (“it’s ok to … / It’s ok that …”) and corresponding requests may seem naive, pathos-laden or oppressive—but never before have more people within the context of a single phenomenon spoken out about the deprivations of growing up in capitalism and patriarchal orders, their normative and toxic leading ideas and the

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associated mental and physical injuries. But here the hope for improvement speaks against despair and resignation— from the triad of learn, listen and heal springs the appeal you can do it, all of which are communicated via hashtag in the epitexts of Instapoetry. Hashtags don’t create content, but they give it legitimacy and visibility when follow-up communication confirms and continues it. Above all, hashtags become a “moment of collective self-awareness” as a community (Stalder 2021, p. 8) when they have a broad impact. Popularity, however, has a clear power of distinction that gives more or less attention to their concerns to one or the other. The entrepreneurial success story is told differently than that of collective therapy and mutual empowerment. A vicious circle, because although mental health (see the hashtag #letstalkaboutmentalhealth and the poetical interventions gathered under it) is such a central part of Instapoetry, Instagram, as various studies suggest, is “the number one worst app for mental health for youth” (Frier 2020, p. 248). Nikita Gill has repeatedly pointed to this curative aspect of Instapoetry. In a story, the compensatory performance that is relevant to many Instapoets is particularly expressed: Poetry should or must compensate for what inaccessible or extremely inflexible health systems (be it for economic reasons, lack of infrastructure or due to social traditions) cannot do. It provides an opportunity to express oneself, to report on suffering and fears, namely now, not in six months or a year, until one of the rare therapy places has been found, and this to an audience that can receive and respond confirmatively immediately. In the process of ongoing processing of the traumas, something like healing could take place (Fig. 9). The call to action, which emphasizes the positive individual function, is accompanied by a call to fight the system that is (co-)responsible for these traumas—at this

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Fig. 9  @nikita˗gill, Story, 29.12.2021

point it remains open which concrete options are envisaged here. In addition to the obvious ‘systems’ of patriarchy and capitalism, it is also possible that Instagram is meant, which profits from the high numbers of trauma-therapeutic communication. Against the experience of separation and the suffering of isolation, the community and the active participation in community buildung

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are set. From the community comes the hope for collective healing. This assessment is in agreement with weighty positions: “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion” (bell hooks 2018, p. 215), says the feminist theorist bell hooks. But where does this coming together take place? In the practice of lively exchange, or in a purchasable product that becomes marketable as a result of the public spectacle? Ayu Saraswati and Lili Pâquet have pointed to the consumerist salvation promises that the purchase of a book promises and thus immediately sabotages the political claims (Pâquet 2019, p. 299), when empowerment becomes a commodity (Saraswati 2021, p. 67). Selfcare and mindfulness are part of the widely held ideals of individual care of the Pain Generation (ibid.), they are the crucial part of what Saraswati calls a “neoliberal self(ie) gaze”, a certain gaze on the self that must be worked on and improved by entrepreneurial activity. Public trauma therapy thus correlates with neoliberal positions that reaffirm the idea of improvement in the name of practised self-improvement. The ‘hashtag-empowerment’ is similar to the spiritual life advice of Eckhart Tolle, especially when it evokes the power of now (a book title and leitmotif of Tolle). His advices understand ‘conversion’ and life in general as a permanent chance to actively work out of individual confusion. Where the inspiration for a free and happy life, the liberation from the mind promises ways out of fears, depression and hopelessness, an intuitively understanding ‘knowledge’ is close, which promises relief from the deceptive mind and forms of rational understanding. “There is a way out of suffering and into peace,” Tolle promises in The Power of Now (Tolle 2010, p. 5). In Instapoetry, despite the fateful topics, an optimistic attitude is still used in many parts, which is based on intellectual relief. Form and thematic concretization point

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away from a rational understanding, which in the complexity of knowledge societies is a permanent challenge and sometimes also an overload. Attempts to understand are avoided and replaced by an inward listening, the awareness of feeling and mood takes the place of a political understanding of the world. Healing, happiness and the pious wish ‘you deserve better’, which are in conflict with anxiety and pain, are two sides of the same coin. Ayu Saraswati has shown that the entire complex, which integrally affects the emotional balance of the Pain Generation, i.e. anxiety, violence, abuse and loss experiences, are the conditions for not only appearing in poetry, but also commodifying this processing of experience. In short: To make gold out of pain (Saraswati 2021, p. 67). Namely, write and talk about problems to contribute and to enjoy the promised benefits. Because these needs shared by the community can also be used in other ways. With the mindfulness-community, a new clientele has arisen for corresponding forms of merchandise that specifically responds to the needs of self-exploration and mindfulness exercises. In 2021, Rupi Kaur released a set of “writing prompts” on seventy pastel-colored cards with suggestions on the topic of “selflove” (Kaur 25.10.2021) in order to work ‘creatively’ on one’s own mindfulness, to practice self-reflection in situational role-playing and to compose one’s own aphorisms according to instructions (see Fig. 10): Such motivational slogans and games are known from the field of self-help books and coaching tips. Like the mindfulness diaries sold by other poets, they are “emodities” (Illouz 2018, p. 23), which closely intertwine emotions and commodity form. They aim at the individual solution of problems and the overcoming of “blockades”, which are experienced and treated as individual, but whose structural causes hardly come into focus in the now

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b

Fig. 10  a @rupikaur_, Story 3/3, 25.10.2021, b @rupikaur_, 26.10.2021

and here of the prefabricated gap texts. In them, empowerment and self-care become a creative process that can be extended indefinitely and supplemented by further promising products. Abstract topics with universal reach have it much harder than forms of concrete, individual-focused selfcare. This can be seen, for example, for the topics from the Anthropocene discourse that only appear sporadically in Instapoetry. There are certainly such contributions, but they play hardly any role in the upper popularity and attention rankings. Collective failures of the Anthropocene and the consequences arising from the historical event chain of fossil energy production are only sporadically reflected in instapoetic catastrophes. An instapoet who

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participates in this discourse is Paul Nash (@north_sea_ navigator), who combines professional nature photography with his own texts. Nash is not a very popular artist, and apparently he is not interested in behaving according to the affordances. Instead, his account shows moderate experiments with the possibilities of the platform, variations of poems that are combined with different photos. The Fall from 24.08.2020 is arranged with eight, An Ode to Edgelands from 26.08.2020 even with ten different photos. These mostly black-and-white, atmospheric shots play with the variation of contextualization and interpretation. An example that establishes a connection to the “fall” of civilization, its networks and infrastructure supplies imagines children climbing up on skeletal trees, which can just as well refer to real dead trees as the power lines pictured—in “our beautiful apocalypse” the “parks” have become “ossuaries”, bone houses in which the mortal remains pile up (Fig. 11 ).

Fig. 11  @north_sea_navigator, The Fall, 27.06.2020

At the Other End of the Popularity Scale: DIY and Imitation in the ‘Long Tail’

Two approaches lead to the heart of the matter. One, which can be understood as equivalent to the directive follow the money, has been pursued thus far. This approach was to look where the large numerical values for individual accounts, poems, and poets accumulate, which have helped them to a top position in terms of popularity and derived relevance as well as sales success. Their rise has opened up a range of commodification possibilities that (can) lift text and poet out of the medium and offer them additional stages and merchandise offerings. The other way is to follow the hashtags, to pursue the diversity of forms, contents, and communications, in order to take into account what the phenomenon is all about in its entirety. The ‘head’ has ensured that Instapoetry and its poetry have become a million-dollar business—Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey is the best-selling poetry book in literary history—while other poets barely dare to dream of their own book publication somewhere © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2023 N. Penke, Instapoetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66834-4_5

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in the ‘long tail’ because their poems only receive likes in the one- or two-digit range. This corresponds to the follower structure of social media in general; a few successful, “big” accounts are followed by extremely many with few or no followers at all. So it is also in Instapoetry: a few stars stand out, where thousands of poets follow, who imitatively relate “parasitically” to their popular forms and to their role models in terms of attention economy. But this width provides for the stability of community as a whole phenomenon. Because on the one hand, many of these poets are followers of the others, who in turn supply each other with (not only, but also, numerical) resonance. Many of the examples to be found under #instapoems are clearly inspired by what Kaur, Waheed, Drake and Lovelace have done. Imitation prevails over those attempts to assert themselves distinctively in reflective detachment and rejection of routines, by far. They are connected via the relevant hashtags, from which explicit, visible networks emerge, while the algorithm registers implicit networks due to the interactions, which are invisible for the users. What one has not noticed at first is pointed out in the “Suggestions for you”. Attention successes lead to increased visibility, while the invisible background processes discriminate against the non-popular. The algorithm knows no pity, it will never prioritize posts that have not yet received likes, no matter how outstanding they are designed or how great their experience is. The fight for attention, for confirmation and legitimacy also triggers distribution battles where the prospect of a book and fame is indeed a distant hope, but due to the objective numbers is calculably far away. But it is precisely from this situation that further action and business models have developed that operate with the aspirations and hopes of all those who do not belong to the ‘head’ of the field, but would also like to be rich, famous and, above all, printed.

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In addition, there are those who do not even know how to make Instapoetry at all, and there is also an interest in their incorporation into a broad-based poetry. But it was not only in the course of this expansion that Instapoetry established itself as a read-write culture. Readwrite means that (almost) everyone who reads also writes themselves. Those who participate in Instapoetry in this way are in a loop of self-expression and feedback in a constant dialogue with others, an exchange that brings gains in experience and promotes the increasing professionalization of those involved. Popular practices in this context are writing challenges (cf. Fig. 12), competitions for the joy of text work and experimenting with thematic and/ or formal requirements. @writersaroundtheworld invites you to write a poem about “Guilty Pleasure” in exactly 23 words as part of a “24 Hour Writing Challenge” and to deal creatively with the artificially limited possibilities. The same applies to bookspinepoetry, a combinatory and photographic practice in which book spines with their readable titles are arranged so that a text results from them which can be read as a poem in verses. Whether challenge or #bookspinepoetry, hundreds or thousands participate, with linked contributions or in the comments section under the original posting with the call—this may be marginal compared to the top performers, but it is by no means so for those who take part. This also means traffic that is registered and benefits the account. Under the hashtag #literarischehausaufgabe [literary homework, author’s note] you will find German counterparts to this. Some of these moderately successful instapoets offer advice to the still clueless or undecided on how it is possible to create instagrammable content in just a few minutes. On the WritersXp blog, Shadab Alam shows “How to become an Instagram Poet”, on Youtube the Adam Gary Poetry channel provides instructions and tips on

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Fig. 12  Hashtag “writingchallenges”, 01.02.2022

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“how to grow as an Instapoet”, and directly on Instagram, marketing coach @macullus advises “how to turn your ‘Art’ into marketable skills”. He recommends not looking for followers for one’s own art, but producing art according to the interests of the followers. “You don’t need more Inspiration, you need to sit your ass down and Create”, @macculus proclaimed on 05.07.2021 as his captivating coaching maxim. It is questionable whether such instructions can inspire or even create art. But, as will quickly become clear, this is not decisive for this form of participatory culture—after all, there is already enough existing material with which Instapoetry (or any other content) can be simulated. You just have to call it up. Adam Gary not only refers to the platform canva.com, he also shows how instagrammable content can be produced with a few clicks and which hashtags can reach the relevant target groups (at least potentially). Canva provides stock photos and templates with which material can be quickly and easily produced for the specific formats of the different platforms. A sunset, a snowy mountain landscape, a cute dog, a steaming cup of tea or a multi-layered color gradient as a background? Making a selection is more difficult than finding a suitable text, because even these are sometimes already pre-formatted: Many stock photos are equipped with already formulated and formatted blind text, which can be saved and used directly as quotes, thoughts or poems for Instagram (Figs. 13, 14). “When The Sun / --> Goes Down / & The Lights Turn Low”—such templates are quite suitable as Instapoetry. And they are also posted, liked and commented on as such. I would like to call this form Stock Poetry; which

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Fig. 13  Canva.com, “Vorlagen für Instagram Posts”, 12.05.2021

Fig. 14  Canva.com, “Summer Instagram Post”, 28.01.2022

originates from an archive of pre-fabricated image-text combinations that makes it possible for everyone, regardless of any creative achievement, to enter into the mass production of poetry with such Readymades. Only a few clicks are needed to the instant poet, to suddenly be a published poet and to draw attention and approval from the likes of others. Stock Poetry is a special case of ‘uncreative writing’ (see Goldsmith 2011), which uses Readymades,

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but does not reveal them as such, because it has no aesthetic concept at its core. But why should someone do something like this, take over pre-formatted image-texts and output them as their own content, even tagging them as #poetry or #lyric? Quite simply, to participate, to earn likes and perhaps still make a (monetary) profit from an account. However, the platform lives from the fact that those who actually have nothing to say can still take part in the tumult and ‘shout along’ nevertheless. I myself have tried it out experimentally. At least up to the paywall. With Adam Gary’s tips and a few public domain templates from Canva in tow, I opened an account and posted image-text combinations like the ones pictured above, tagged them with a set of not particularly original hashtags and at least temporarily changed sides. The pull to be an Instapoet and become part of a competitive community was there immediately. Automatically. Not because I wanted to, but because the routines immediately revealed their often-invoked dark sides—with the first posting came the requests “Follow me if you want”, “Check your inbox / DM”—messages disguised as interest, accompanied by less friendly comments if not immediately followed and in return the current posts of the other account were liked. Massively sent messages in the form of chain letters promise large increases in a short period of time, at least 8000 followers. No insignificant number, because most of the accounts that follow me and that I follow are far below that. We provide each other with likes and comments, a community that is less about empathetic togetherness and identity politics than about mundane number gains and the ‘best possible’ performance. This brings stress and also annoyance from the start, because the routines are communicated

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­ nmistakably: The numerical growth of an account can u be achieved through these usual procedures—to engage in the willingness to give each other, recognition is signaled through l4l (like for like ) or follow back, which are designed for mutual reinforcement. The procedural routines of this community are strictly pragmatic, they come independently of the actual recognition, even the perception of the texts of others, because, as I can see, some post the same comments under all the texts of different accounts. Obviously, those who post multiple times do not read what is actually written in a text post, nor do they take into account the peculiarities of imagetext combinations and/or the personal relationship to the content. It is solely about registering likes. Because, as I am told unequivocally, these users rely on their instrumental attention being reciprocated with an (equal) return. “Hey, I liked your stuff, so pls like mine” was the gist of more than one message I received if I didn’t like someone’s latest post quickly enough. At times I followed around 1000 accounts, most of which also followed me. If I had wanted to, my whole day could have consisted of liking, commenting and responding to messages that placed great value on my opinion or a numerical appreciation and contributions to the traffic of the accounts behind them. Poetry is hardly an afterthought. Anyone who plays this game is completely zany. “A game that one could win”? No way. Out of the question. Or not quite? Because there are paid features and the promise of increasing like and follower numbers within the platform, as well as those that allow one to make a big splash outside with their own book contribution or at least to move their visibility to other terrain and appear as a published poet in their family or circle of friends. All of this can be accomplished with money. Not only can one make money with the promises of anthology and own book publications, but also with features that are mostly offered by

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accounts with a larger reach and that are willing to pay for a linked mention in the stories or a re-posting by those in need of numbers. If I had to deal with probably mostly human actors in the case of the like-squealers, there was another level of communication in this context. Because under every post that was published with the right hashtags, bots posted quite a few offers: “Promote it on @xyz”, “Send it to @ xyz”, “check your inbox, I have a good purposal for you ♥”. These spam comments and messages in turn referred to profiles that mostly had six- or seven-digit follower numbers and gave the impression that they were running some kind of literature mediation. They made recommendations, apparently linked to promising profiles, and had their featured poets every week who had apparently written particularly promising texts. So my stock poetry could also appear there? Had anyone even looked at my profile? No. Nobody looked at anything except the timely arrival of PayPal payments. Accounts like @thewriterswarmth, @ frozen_whispers or @writersoftheweek all follow a similar business model. They had tempting offers for me that were brought into the comments and into the mailbox via automated bots in order to avoid a blocking of the respective main account, since the mass sending of the same messages (spam) is prohibited by Instagram. In addition to the ‘attention-philanthropy’ that they apparently pursue and the sincere support of committed users, paid promotion is now a widely used strategy to quickly increase one’s own numbers and buy the appearance of popularity. Paid promotion is a strategy that, at least according to the promise of the providers, can avoid the tedious interactions with others. Far-reaching accounts offer an immense increase in attention through their services for usually 10–20 US dollars. Permanent postings cost around 25 US dollars, combined services or even weekly promotion are

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relatively cheaper, the bigger the booked package is. For $80, I am promised at least 300 new followers and many likes of my posts. But that’s not enough to really become popular and generate a reach that goes beyond the circle of similarly acting accounts. Or rather, the investment sum is still far too low. To achieve a five-digit increase in followers, I would therefore have to invest a few thousand dollars—of course without any guarantee that the desired numbers will actually materialize. And then? This would certainly not be a real fan base. The temptation to invest in uncovered popularity is reminiscent of the practices of economic speculation, be it real estate, be it options trading, where probabilities are calculated and some make big profits while others lose everything. Here, those who invest in number increases that do not bring them anything lose, because the money disappears, but the wishes and hopes of being celebrated as a poet will hardly be fulfilled in this way. But the commodification of poets’ aspirations does not exhaust itself in such features and growing numerical values within the platform, but continues under the guiding idea of getting published. Already on the second day of my Insta(Stock)poetry˗career, the first offer came to participate in an anthology. Thematically open, whether prose or poetry, would not matter. Everything could be submitted and certainly also printed—after payment of a certain amount. On request, I learned that the volume would be published in India. In which publishing house, in which edition, with how many printed copies and whether there will be something like specimen copies remained open. So I declined because I also mistrusted this chance ‘to make a big splash’. But the business idea seems to be very lucrative, as I calculated quickly the income and compared it with the realistic publication costs. If 100 people can be found who are willing to pay between 50 and 100 US˗Dollars each, then it will be a lucrative enterprise for

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the editors, which should be repeated soon. There are of course enough texts and poets with ambitions. Other providers also offer it to ‘particularly talented’ poets to participate in an ‘exclusive’ anthology with one or more texts, after which, in the event of a sales success, the possibility of their own poetry book might arise. This is also a maybe that also depends solely on the willingness to pay; but not on the poetical ability or the language skills, because both are completely irrelevant. In addition to some Englishlanguage anthologies, I could also have published in Portuguese, Korean or Nepali, without knowing any of these languages or using them in my contributions. But these publication procedures do not go into the terms of self or predatory publishing. With them, neither visibility is created nor are they predatory in the narrower sense. What they are doing is monetizing dreams and wishful thinking, holding the ‘own book’ in their hands and being able to understand themselves as part of an emphathically understood guild of ‘published’ poets. In addition, think of the ambitions of many young people that have been and are stoked by pop music, the hope of following in the footsteps of a Rupi Kaur, who had started her exceptional career in a very similar way. Stars that motivate imitation also fuel this market with arbitrary anthologies and print˗on˗demand˗books. Such promoters and publishers in turn offer “infrathin platforms” within the Meta˗platform against money; the “wafer-thinness of such publishing business” lies in the fact that they offer nothing, “what authors with a minimum of digital world knowledge could do themselves with the help of Lulu” (Bajohr 2016, p. 80). With providers such as lulu.com, these potential authors could also approach their books in a self-publishing way, without the intermediating step, which only increases the costs, without doing more for the visibility of author and book.

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But in this context, the book as a book also has a special meaning, because it is obviously perceived as a qualitative difference to the free posting on Instagram. The aura of the book, and may it be the cheapest paperback with sloppy binding, works. This also applies to those who buy books from Instapoets—the texts and images that are reused in these publication processes were initially always free of charge on Instagram and can be seen by everyone, even if it is not permanently readable, it can be stored by everyone. The fact that the book as a material fact has outlived its usefulness is refuted by the Instapoetry in stacks at both ends of the popularity scale. In the wake of the great attention successes of the leading Instapoets and the phenomenon as a whole, an intermediary industry has arisen that has found and professionally routinised even more monetization levels. It lives solely on the hopes and wishes of those who would like to be perceived as writers, but neither have a special feel for convincing text design nor suspect that there might be other ways to enter the literary public with (mostly) more serious companies. In a field that is growing more and more competitive just for the favor of the algorithm and the mere attention of an otherwise undefined audience through inflationarily used hashtags, it is becoming increasingly unlikely to be able to achieve attention successes that set one apart from the majority of Instapoets. But this mediated form of publishing is based on prospects and promises, which obviously means a lucrative business above all for the publishers, who need not have anything to do with literature at all. With no own costs (except for the time invested in bots and their fake accounts) a good turnover is reproduced every day. But the appearance remains that they only promote ‘outstanding poets’ and want to ‘support their art’. The profiles linked to @writersoftheweek are not the ‘best’ new

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discoveries of the past week, but only those who have paid for the complete promotion package in recent times. This not only does a disservice to the poets featured in this way in terms of authenticity, it also shows the gap between those who can invest a few hundred dollars for sometimes completely meaningless texts, which will probably not be read by anyone in a book, and those who instead have to struggle with communication work because the costs are simply too high for them. Those who are poor have to work, those who have means can take a shortcut. The same applies to the books published in this way as to the numerical values of the accounts and their contributions: the lack of transparency in their coming into being. How numerical values, likes and followers grow and what they are covered by remains just as invisible as the basis of the features based on paid promotion. Creativity and leisure are thus transformed into another form of work for many, with which they compete globally. The prospect of success, fame or money drives this production machine, where so much is at stake that the starting point, a text, a poem or a prose miniature, becomes a quantité négligeable. Especially where this path to attention and fame is taken with prefabricated material. Among the five million #instapoetry˗postings, there are quite a few Canva˗templates that are used over and over again. A quantitative analysis could determine which sunflower field and which wavy ocean is used most often. Already when scrolling through the current postings of the past days, some appear several times, which I had also used. They too contribute to the overall impression of Instapoetry, which is far from the ambitious poets and their serious concerns. In these depths, the effects of great popularity can be observed, which are only interesting as a whole phenomenon, in individual cases they are an extreme form of digital communication, which perhaps

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marks the opposite pole to the hype around NFTs: Not the unique file, but the almost identical postings in minor variations. Data garbage that draws attention away from serious issues, burdens the servers and ultimately represents a waste of resources that are valuable: attention, time and energy. This too is part of Instagrammism, which stimulates the communication of non-information (and perhaps even understands it as a form of ‘creative’ practice), the call for the permanent waste of human and technical resources, because this data is also valuable for the company. At least that. The hashtag with its millions of contributions thus also refers to a part that must be understood as a dump, whose debris constantly grows and is not yet regulated. The pollution of a public sphere that is relevant to many people, which can be blanked out, but still causes damage to everyone.

Why all the Fighting? Ambivalences and Dream Scenarios

Instagram’s creativity device has been in place for over ten years now. While it may not be “everyone” who captures their experiences in photos or otherwise shapes and posts them visually, communicates their worries and feelings, and sends everything they can think of from their lives at any time and from any location, there are still so many of them that no previous cohesive communication system has ever had. In addition to the many serious voices and effective images, a noise of data garbage further amplifies the hubbub. The phenomenon of Instapoetry is the result of a new “structural change in public life” in all its parts. Jürgen Habermas recently put forward some theses to transfer his earlier theory from 1962 to the changed media realities of the 21st century. In it, he formulates the assumption that, just as “printing made everyone potential readers, so digitalization today makes everyone potential authors. But how long did it take for everyone to learn to read?” (Habermas 2021, p. 489) Apart from the fact © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2023 N. Penke, Instapoetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66834-4_6

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that with the invention of printing and the literacy successes it promoted, “everyone” could never have learned to read, the question is nevertheless interesting. The idea that everyone writes and, if perhaps mediated, publishes and discusses what has been written in the sense of a free public, has different components. On the one hand, it assumes a fully literalized world as the norm, in which everyone is permanently integrated into stable media-mediated communication networks. That is written is primarily relevant, less what. This would explain and legitimize the imitative and parasitic entourage of Instapoetry at the same time, if it no longer refers to poetry as a form of “higher” writing and speaking. There are some ideas in literary history about what the total literarization could lead to. Two visions: once in Louis Sébastian Merciers utopian novel L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais (1771, translated to English as Memoirs of the year two thousand five hundred ) as a future in which all citizens write literarily and are encouraged to do so in the service of progress without interruption—another by Jorge Louis Borges in La Biblioteca de Babel (1941, The Library of Babel ), in which all possible character strings have already been written down in books and it is like looking for a needle in a haystack to find a book in the library that can not only be read, but also makes sense. His vision is determined by redundancy and unreadability of character strings that do not contain any meaningful information, and exceed human test capacities in the incessant repetition. Each new medium, each platform cultivates its own forms of writing, dissemination and reading, which in turn means that another “language” has to be learned for each platform. Instead of some forms of literality that printing has produced, users are confronted with a variety of writing styles that each require different usage routines and have now also been internalized. Social media

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platforms each provide different means for their own forms of digital literacy. The right “reading” is quickly learned on Instagram, it takes longer to break away from the habit of ultra-short attention spans. Reading competence also includes the ability to appropriately assess the forms of simulated writing, deception and pseudo-communication with bots. But it is at least as much about writing, about trying and finding a style and a frequency that allows you to benefit from the positive aspects of attention and community-building without being ground up by the mill of continuous operation. Even a wording like ‘oversharing’ indicates that the crossing of boundaries—the graspability as well as the justifiability—can have different facets. The same applies to the claim to completely overview such thematic fields. But nobody has to. The idea of an omniscient subject that has everything in view as a quasi-divine observer becomes not only obsolete under the conditions of the digital dissolution of the boundaries, but rather absurd. Even with the utmost zaniness the horizon is not within reach. Selection and taste are all the more important if you do not want to consume, read, consider or further communicate anything. Aesthetic criteria then gain clear value. This also applies to literary texts; the simple question of the “why” of form and communication occasion can pave the way. Serious Instapoetry shows itself in its breadth as a kind of ‘connecting poetry’ that builds on current discourse or is actively involved in its production. It is discourse poetry and makes invisibility visible for individuals and their problems that are lifted from latency to publicity, it makes “patterns” visible “with which one sees digitally what remains hidden analogously” (Nassehi 2019, p. 50). In this case, under- or misrepresented topics, associated moods, conflicts, political positions and identity assertions that have not yet found their place, especially with regard to literature.

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With the technical (via the individual profile) as well as the identification-based restriction to the self and its individual responsibilities (Saraswati 2021, p. 5), Instapoetry is not an explicit political poetry in the emphatic as well as the traditional sense, despite its efforts to take up politically relevant positions. It is neither the bearer of a certain world view nor does it pursue clearly identifiable goals of changing or reshaping social relations and institutional structures in a broad sense. In its tendency, it laments and accuses that certain experiences are sad global facts that can probably be generalized. However, it does not go so far as to address an indiscriminate humanity, but rather takes up and fixes the indelible difference between victim and perpetrator, between those affected and those attacking. While those who consider themselves unaffected or indifferent should also behave in these constellations, the impetus is not necessarily mandatory. Nor is there a political figure beyond individual representatives for the community. The ‘community of feeling’ thus resembles many, but by no means all, digital communities, which can be understood as swarms from a media-theoretical point of view, which “consist of isolated egos”, but which have not yet “formed into a political figure ” (Han 2013, p. 10). They become visible in that they “generate certain patterns of which they may not be aware” (ibid.). In such a swarm, individual, instinct-driven behavior and the enthusiasm for a cause, as a form of fanaticism [‘Schwärmerei’ in German, alludes to ‘Schwarm’, the ‘swarm’; author’s note] so to speak, come together. Since the swarm as a temporary collective does not have a fixed structure and thus does not confer stable identities, it requires constant performance. Not least for this reason, it is one of the role models of a ‘fluid’ modernity, an adequate form of multi-option society, which is designed to offer more and more options, thus increasing its complexity, because with each new option the number

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of those who cannot be realized increases. The feeling of FOMO, the fear of missing out, increases the stress level and forms the basic tone of instagrammatic maximum use. More and more leisure time, which is invested in the platform, has to be filled with more and more content. On the other hand, more circulation of content and thus of information also means increased turnover, first of all for the platform, then for the users. To react to this social, medial and economic disposition is only partly included in the indictments, which have identified “Instagrief ” as the cause of “compair and despair” and the overload caused by complexity. Ascetic practices such as so-called ‘digital abstinence’ are attempts to deal with the hardships of permanent use in an individual way. However, the support of the community, its participation and its encouragement were lacking, as was the visibility of its concerns, the voice in the choir of the tortured would have to be (temporarily) silenced. Although digital detox, the ‘detoxification’ of social media through a temporary break, can be discussed or tried out as a strategy; however, it does not have a longterm effect on the functioning of the platform and their little humane manners. How this situation could be dealt with politically and which structural changes would be necessary, the art historian Wolfgang Ullrich has discussed (Ullrich 2020). The democratization of access to the production and publication of images that are embedded in global networks is increasingly in contradiction to the lack of transparency of the platform. Overcoming the dark sides and follow-up costs, which could be posed as emancipation in the long run, is not possible under the conditions of a private-sector public sphere that sets the rules and infrastructure without providing opportunities for objection and co-determination. The strict mode of ‘output-legitimation’ would have to be softened or reversed, ideally transferred

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into a network of literary commons, and the power of the platform democratized accordingly. Ideas and demands to ‘democratize’ the large, extremely influential platforms and bring them under public responsibility, to make their algorithms transparent and changeable and thus ultimately also to regulate their power, have been repeatedly formulated. The platform has unleashed potentials that could be immensely terrible for social communication, for increasing resonance, and even for something like global solidarity and cohesion. If they were not undermined by the logic of permanent evaluation and ubiquitous competition at the same time, Instapoetry could be a sign of democratic literature, provided that the infrastructure would follow. The digital automation may relieve the neurotic ‘compulsion character’ of the ‘counting mania’ (Barthes 1989, pp. 70–75), but it does not relieve from the rule of the number and its constraints, but rather fuels the quantitative evaluation of all sorts of things that have not been quantified before. The permanent, quantifying surveillance only relieves from one malady, but it does not liberate, because it installs and perpetuates new evils. This too is a processual event of ‘eternal provisionality’ that never comes to an end. But this is what it should be about, if the numerous impairments, worries and burdens could actually be overcome together. Georg Lukács has formulated the thesis that “every form […] is the dissolution of a basic dissonance of existence” (Lukács 1965, p. 59). Even without a foundation in a specific philosophy of history, this can perhaps be transferred to Instapoetry. It may not be the dominant form of our time, there are countless others, from the thousand-page fantasy novel to series, song lyrics and documentary theatre, which are also typical of the 2010s and 2020s—but the dissonance that is repeatedly sent to a “dissolution” in Instapoetry, which is only partially dealt with

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by the other forms. And if so, then less quickly, immediately, interactively and interconnectively than in the freely chosen communities and calculated networks of Instagram. But the suffering spread around the world, articulated from individual perspectives, but diversely linked and calculated, also raise charges that, it can not stay that way as it has become, despite changed opportunities for participation and expression, for setting agendas and community building. But the conscious handling of systemic effects will show how far-reaching the impulses can be that arise from this collective text and trauma therapy. Whether the community beyond the hashtags takes on forms of political organisation, involves other initiatives and has a stronger impact beyond the boundaries of the medium will in turn also decide whether the “reflexive impotence” and the “depressive hedonia” of phantasmagoria can be overcome (Fisher 2009, p. 21) in order to actually provoke a “real change” (Miller 2021, p. 179). Between them floats a dream of convergence in the sign of popularity (Penke/Schaffrick 2018, p. 174), that quantity and quality will come together. In the perception of some, this is certainly not the case with Instapoetry. For some, it is formally uninteresting material of the culture industry, for others, however, a primarily self-referential art is irrelevant, they are interested in the confirmation of dispositions and the arousal of effects. But in the dream of convergence in the sign of great popularity, art and commerce are reconciled, as in Instapoetry comfort and pleasure are intertwined, something people like to spend their time on, from which they seek support, which is denied to them elsewhere, which brings together contradictory things and creates communities that did not exist before. It is likely that the “moving landscapes” (Boyd 2014, p. 27) of the platform(s), regardless of any possible democratization, will not be the same in a few years. But the

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users will not be the same either, literature will continue to emerge from these developments that will differ from what we know today in the ‘chain dance of agency’. But it is also clear that Instapoetry is unlikely to follow such an aesthetic primacy as literature studies would particularly like. The nightmare of a largely heteronomous text production would remain. A literature that, because of the ‘pragmata’ that influence its creation, dissemination and perception, no longer knows that it could also be quite different as literature. But the work on the form continues day by day with the struggle for content. And it is to be wished for the political concerns as well as for the poetry that they entrust themselves to other muses than algorithms and popularity scores.

Thanks

Some considerations have already been tried out and discussed in individual parts and other contexts in lectures, essays and workshops. I therefore thank all those with whom I have spoken about Instagram and the phenomenon of Instapoetry in recent years, discussed questions and objections or received useful suggestions. This applies in particular to Claudia Benthien, Heinz Drügh, Markus Hunold, Maren Lickhardt, Ferdinand Pöhlmann, Carolin Prinz, Matthias Schaffrick, Carla Waldenfels and Niels Werber. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to the participants of the Master Seminar Medien der Lyrik (TU Dresden, Winter Semester 2019/2020) and the Akademie für Lyrikkritik at the Haus für Poesie in Berlin (November 2021). My special thanks go to Frieda, who supported the completion of this book in many ways.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2023 N. Penke, Instapoetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66834-4

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The following essays have preceded this book • #instapoetry. Populäre Lyrik und ihre Affordanzen. In: LILI. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, special issue Medien der Literatur, Vol. 03/2019, pp. 451–475. • Populäre Schreibweisen. Instapoetry und Fan Fiction. In: Hannes Bajohr / Annette Gilbert (Eds.): Digitale Literatur II. Special issue of Text + Kritik. 2021, pp. 91–105. • Instapoetry. Zur Gefühlsgemeinschaft einer digitalen Popkultur. In: Schriftenreihe der Jungen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz, Vol. 02/2021, pp. 58–72. • Form und Formular. Über eine Differenz der Formularisierung lyrischer Texte am Beispiel der Instapoetry. In: Peter Plener / Niels Werber / Burkhardt Wolf (Eds.): Das Formular. Stuttgart 2022, pp. 293– 305. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64084-5_18 • Akzeleration und Experiment. Über Variation und Wiederholung in der Instapoetry. In: Elias Kreuzmair/ Magdalena Pflock/Eckard Schumacher (Eds.): Feeds, Tweets & Timelines - Schreibweisen der Gegenwart in Sozialen Medien. Bielefeld 2022, pp. 77–92.

Figure References

Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5

Fig. 6 Fig. 7 Fig. 8 Fig. 9 Fig. 10a Fig. 10b Fig. 11 Fig. 12 Fig. 13 Fig. 14

Search query “instapoetry”, 20.06.2022 @ringbahnpoesie, 12.01.2020 @adorawilliamspoetry, Survey in the Story, 16.06.2021 @thetypewriterdaily, Postings 26.02.–26.03.2019 Book cover, from left to right and top to bottom: Rupi Kaur, Caroline Kaufman, R.M. Drake, Atticus, Clara Louise, Nikita Gill, Lang Leav @nikita-gill, What I Weigh, 16.07.2021 @rupikaur_, you trace the bruises on your ribs, 18.11.2013 @rupikaur_, 07.10.2015 @nikita-gill, Story, 29.12.2021 @rupikaur_, Story 3/3, 25.10.2021 @rupikaur_, 26.10.2021 @north_sea_navigator, The Fall, 27.06.2020 Hashtag “writingchallenges”, 01.02.2022 Canva.com, “Vorlagen für Instagram Posts”, 12.05.2021 Canva.com, “Summer Instagram Post”, 28.01.2022

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2023 N. Penke, Instapoetry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66834-4

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