What do we do with Instagram? How do we account for e-literary communities and practices on social media platforms, particularly when their only constant is extreme volatility as they risk getting shut down,¹ turned off,² or falling prey to culture wars?³ Even when things are “up,” features are constantly shifting, coming into focus, and even going away, as with Instagram’s 2025 change to its supposedly iconic square. These platforms are not only volatile, but they are uniquely dense, layering technologies, techno-capitalist values, and cultural discourse; yet, this layering also gives rise to dramatically new and different forms of e-lit. Here, we find literary practice situated amongst influencers, brand identities, algorithmic aesthetics, populist virality, datafication, user community(ies), techno-surveillance capitalism, and software constraints. What does it mean to make e-lit in these spaces, engaging with volatile platforms and the communities that use them? Likewise, what is our responsibility as scholars to these communities, particularly those that, like many popular insta-poets and their “fans,” are neither creating nor consuming third generation e-lit qua e-lit?⁴

In 2020, the Electronic Literature Organization, recognizing the many ways in which e-lit is constantly evolving in response to technological development and change, launched the Emerging Spaces for E-Lit Creation initiative. This grant sought to create new spaces in which to “curate, promote, and explore a greatly expanded set of works on popular social media spaces online” (“CFP: Emerging Spaces for E-Lit Creations”), which resulted in the creation of Filter, a ‘zine for electronic literature, entirely housed on Instagram (“@filterinstazine”). Following the launch of Filter’s inaugural issue, ELO’s The NEXT launched a traveling exhibition featuring its first six works (“Filter Insta-Zine: Instagram Storytelling and Zine Culture”). As part of the exhibition, we—Sarah Whitcomb Laiola, Filter’s managing and founding editor, and Richard Snyder, The NEXT’s Metadata Specialist for the exhibition—took on the task of recording metadata for each of the works published in Filter’s inaugural issue. This practice required us to set down the role played by Instagram in these fairly novel third-generation works with some degree of permanence. Specifically, we were tasked with determining how best to describe these works using The NEXT’s Extended eLectronic Metadata Schema (ELMS).

Though this may seem like a straightforward task, the degree to which capturing metadata relies on close reading and interpretive analysis cannot be understated—particularly for such novel works as these. Moreover, compared to open tagging frameworks, like those used in the Electronic Literature Collections, ELMS required us to describe the works using an array of specific fields with controlled vocabularies. Four of those fields occupied the bulk of our time and, we found, carried much wider implications for electronic literature: Authoring Platform(s), Software Dependency(ies), Digital Quality(ies), and Genre(s) all required us to contend with the role played by Instagram in these works. The popular social media environment was certainly the primary platform through which many of these works were created and accessed (their Authoring Platform and Software Dependency). However, it was also always more; Instagram’s unique density of technological constraints, aesthetics, and modes of social action always formed and informed the creation and reception of the literary created within its ecosystem.

As a result, we found ourselves repeatedly asking: what do we do with Instagram? How do we capture this complexity? Where do we account for the relationship of the platform to the work in the metadata record?

We approached this question with care, recognizing the role that an archive like The NEXT plays in making texts available to future readers, scholars, and artists. A metadata record does not just determine a work’s accessibility, but it may also overdetermine a work’s interpretive reception. This article recounts the decisions we made in extending ELMS to accommodate Instagram for the specific works in Filter. These decisions, however, hold more wider-reaching implications; we found that the relationship between the work and the platform dramatically shifts for third-generation e-lit, particularly when that platform is itself a part of the wider contemporary social media landscape. Indeed, we argue that it is time for us to consider that platforms like Instagram do not only aid the creation and distribution of e-literary works, but may also inform their very literariness, perhaps even constituting new genres.

E-Lit Metadata and ELMS

Electronic literature has had community-driven⁵ metadata structures since the early 2000s. The Consortium on Electronic Literature (CELL) metadata schema, developed through an ELO initiative, has been adopted by both the Electronic Literature Directory (ELD) and ELMCIP (Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice). The Electronic Literature Collection (ELC) was launched in 2006 and offers a different, tag-based approach to metadata for the works it anthologizes.⁶

The specificity of approach in these initiatives suggests that e-lit authors and scholars have long recognized a truth about born-digital artifacts: they must be described and disseminated differently than their print counterparts. There has also been a clear desire in the e-lit community to move forward with collecting and preserving works without waiting for permission or guidance from traditional archival structures. While ELD and ELMCIP have not collected works themselves, they have made a point to archive links, when possible, to at least one point of access, even if those links eventually break. The ELCs are mixed in their approach, with some linking externally and some providing a copy of the featured e-lit artifact. Launched in 2021, ELO’s The NEXT — a combination library, museum, and preservation space—provides a single place where the physical media and digital files of e-lit works are collected, preserved, maintained, and made available for open access to the public. Its Extended eLectronic Metadata Schema (“Extended eLectronic Metadata Schema”), or ELMS, is based on both e-lit-specific approaches from CELL and the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) from the Library of Congress (“Metadata Object Description Schema”). The goal of ELMS has been to empower researchers and general visitors to The NEXT as they browse and experience thousands of archived and preserved e-lit works. Given The NEXT’s aims to serve future generations of e-lit readers, ELMS categories are quite specific and differentiated in how they capture both technical specifications and literary valences—and the relationship between the two. Often, the process of describing an e-lit work in such detail has led to important insights, such as when Dene Grigar discovered in her versioning of Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story, an unrecorded history of that work (Grigar, et al.).

New types of works, artifacts, and scholarship have expanded ELMS’s definitions for nearly all categories over the past four years. The continued evolution of ELMS reveals much about how electronic literature departs from print culture; as the field continues to push the bounds of creativity with digital platforms, spaces, tools, and code, ELMS follows suit. Adding to that, as we found in preparing the records for Filter, the need for a flexible and extensible schema is nowhere more apparent than when dealing with the “massive scale of born-digital work” that Leonardo Flores identifies as third-generation e-lit (Flores).

Third Generation E-Lit and Filter Insta-Zine

In 2018, Leonardo Flores celebrated that electronic literature had entered its “third generation.” This so-called “third-gen e-lit” refers to post-2005 “born digital work produced by and for contemporary audiences for whom digital media has become naturalized” (Flores) and marks a critical shift in the trajectory of electronic literature as a body of creative work. In terms of e-literary practice, third-gen marks a shift away from the first and second generations’ use of custom-code and original interfaces—what has been described as a distinctly modernist aesthetic and sensibility (Pressman)—towards the use of pre-existing platforms and programs like Instagram, Snapchat, Imgflip, Twine, Unity, Cheap Bots Done Quick! or Philome.la (Flores), embracing thereby a distinctly populist sensibility and attendant aesthetic of ease.

The recognition and categorization of third-generation work that might be considered e-lit qua E-Lit, has been fraught, not least because this aesthetic shift also signals, for some, a potential turn away from “one of e-literature’s founding principles: that to read e-lit requires non-trivial effort, whether that effort is physical interaction and/or cognitive complexity” (Berens, E-lit’s #1 Hit, 19). While it is tempting to read a resistance to third-gen e-lit that stems from its ease, obvious- or “ordinary-”ness as little more than generational gatekeeping, Kathi Inman Berens clarifies that this “skepticism moves beyond veneration of artisanal code,” and instead stems from a mistrust of the “corporate apparatus and profit-motivated agenda that makes third gen e-lit so easy to make” (Berens, “Artisanal interfaces”). Indeed, it is impossible to separate the production of third generation e-lit through social media platforms from those platforms’ techno-capitalist apparatuses, which run antithetical to E-Lit’s historical relationship to technological production.

From this anxiety, Alex Saum-Pascaul offers another take, plainly stating that what is “truly interesting third gen e-lit is that which maintains a hyperawareness of the capitalist commodification and datafication of human experience on the Web, but relates to it in a sort of ironic, shoulder-shrug-meh, as it oscillates between defiance and conformism” (Saum, Is Third Gen Postweb). The challenge of Saum’s imagined “truly interesting” third-gen e-lit, though, is that it requires authorial intention, which runs counter to Flores’ initial celebration of entering e-lit’s third generation. For him, part of the excitement stems from the very premise that third-gen e-lit may be (and often is) made by creators who have never heard of, nor are intentionally producing, electronic literature as such. Of course, this points to another area of the third-generation’s fraught reception: how can we take the work seriously as E-Lit if the authors themselves do not understand the work in this way? Enter: Filter.

Founded in November 2020 by Sarah Whitcomb Laiola and Chloe Anna Milligan, Filter is a digital ‘zine that aims to circulate and promote works of e-lit and its criticism that engage with, disrupt, and/or are optimized for the poetics of Instagram. It invites e-lit creators and critics alike to explore the critical-creative possibilities latent in platform features ranging from 10-frame image posts and time-limited Stories to looped Boomerangs, video Reels, and Interactive Stickers.

An experiment in e-literary publishing and an exploratory project in its own right, Filter marks an important crossroads in how we understand the relationship between Instagram and creative-critical (e-)literary work. On the one hand, as a publication venue, it mobilizes Instagram in its most familiar, popular mode: a social media site for sharing photo- and video-based content. This is the model of Instagram through which popular, third-generation e-lit practices like Insta-poetry emerge. On the other hand, it invites an engagement with Instagram as a platform that is not limited to literary distribution, but that is integral to the creation of e-literary art. How can we understand a 10-frame image series or a story’s expiration as a poetic constraint? How does the looped Boomerang prompt us to reconsider recursivity, and how is remix re-interpreted through Repost? What possibilities for one-touch narrative interaction are there in moving from one story frame to another, and how does the 24-hour temporal limit to Stories require us to rethink the relationship between born-digital literature, performance, and liveness? These are the kinds of questions that Filter asks, as it prompts e-literary artists and critics to consider Instagram as not just a platform for distribution, but also for the creation of e-literary work.

In October 2021, Filter launched its inaugural issue. Themed, “What is Instagram E-Lit?” the issue sought to explore this space of platform complexity and invited submissions to three of its four sections. These included #TIL or “Today’s Instagram Lit,” which features new works of Instagram-based electronic literature and appears in Filter’s photo-feed; #DIY, or “Do It Yourself,” which features teaching-focused resources like tutorials, assignments, or critical making guides for e-literary pedagogy that, like TIL, shares content in the photo-feed; and #Masterclass, which puts creators and critics in conversation with one another through short video interviews about works we have published and shares content exclusively through Stories.

From its initial CFP, Filter received submissions for both the #TIL and #Masterclass areas which were split into the ‘zine’s first two issues. The inaugural issue (October 2021) included six works in its #TIL section. An excerpt from the Marino Family’s Coronation is a daily webcomic that acts as both a coping mechanism and work of creative nonfiction about life during the COVID-19 pandemic (Marino Family). Raynen Bajette Amos’ Salt & Smoke // Air and Water; deconstructed meme (hereafter shortened to, “Salt & Smoke”) presents a series of looped gifs that use machine learning algorithms to envision “life-reminiscent forms which are yet to arrive” (Amos). In James Mackay’s roadsurfacesofcypress, images of road surfaces from Cypress are overlaid with poetic text that challenges Instagram’s aesthetic expectations (Mackay). Short video selections from Richard Carter’s Waveforms feature the Cornish shoreline accompanied by text that is printed along the waveline and generated from a lexical database corresponding to the coordinates that identify the boundary between wave and shore. Excerpts from xtine burrough’s I Got Up 2020, Pandemic Edition (hereafter “I Got Up 2020”)—a project housed on Instagram at the account @Igotup2020—challenge the interplay between spectacle and the mundane by documenting the time each day that burrough woke up in 2020 (burrough). Finally, Penny Florence’s UM, a piece of videographic poetry whose cuts and internal movements are determined by the 15-second constraint of Instagram’s Story frames, evokes the legend of a giant at the island castle of UM, St. Michael’s Mount (Florence). In addition to these #TIL works, Mark Marino provided a #Masterclass series about Coronation.

In celebration of Filter’s first issue, The NEXT exhibited the six works from the TIL section in their show, “Filter InstaZine: Instagram Storytelling and Zine Culture,” which ran from April 1st to July 18th, 2022. Preparing the necessary metadata for the exhibition, we determined that four particular fields within ELMS required extensive expansion in order to accommodate the works from Filter, and, by extension, Instagram-based third generation e-lit. These fields, which we discuss in detail below, are “Authoring Platform(s),” “Software Dependency(ies),” “Digital Quality(ies),” and “Genre(s).”

Before we detail how we extended ELMS, it is important to note that we were working to describe the specific instantiation of these works as formatted for Instagram by the Filter editors.⁷ In some instances, as will become clearer further on, the editors of Filter were required to adjust the format of the artworks in order to accommodate the limitations of the platform—changing gifs to looped videos, for instance, given that as of this writing and the Filter issue, Instagram does not support gifs on its platform.

Authoring Platform(s) and Software Dependency(ies)

Among the metadata we assigned to the works in Filter were their Authoring Platform(s) and Software Dependency(ies), two fields that fall within the “hardware and software” category of ELMS descriptions. As its name suggests, the former captures the platform(s) on which the bulk of the composition was performed and/or which has most influenced its form and content. Some, like Penny Florence’s looped video UM, were clearly made with a video editing platform, in this case Final Cut Pro (Florence), while the Marino Family’s Coronation Webcomic was made for and with WordPress and serially published on that platform (“Coronation Webcomic”). Meanwhile, xtine burrough used Instagram itself as the Authoring Platform in her piece, I Got up 2020—a dedicated Instagram account that burrough describes as an “insta series.”

Because we were describing each work’s specific Filter instantiation, it quickly became clear that we would need to reckon with Instagram as a platform for all works appearing in the ‘zine. Accordingly, we listed Instagram as the Authoring Platform not only for works like I Got up 2020, but also for those which the editorial team needed to significantly reformat in order to publish them as Instagram posts, for instance, as in the case of Coronation, which we reformatted from WordPress to Instagram. Thus, the entirety of Filter’s first issue ended up with Instagram listed as Authoring Platform. However, as we continued to interpret and describe these works, it became clear that, for several of them, this field would be insufficient to fully capture the breadth of Instagram’s role.

Where Authoring Platform(s) describes what was used to create the work, Software Dependency(ies) describes what is needed to access the work. The entries for the two do not always match.⁸ For some works in the issue, Instagram evidently needed to be listed as both an Authoring Platform and a Software Dependency, and here, again, I Got Up 2020 offers an illustrative example. Other works, like Waveforms, were accessible outside of Instagram prior to their inclusion in Filter (“Waveform”), which would suggest that Instagram is not a software dependency. However, once again, since we were preparing a metadata record for these works as they appeared in Filter, we reached a similar conclusion: just as Instagram needed to be captured as an Authoring Platform for each text, so too did it need to be captured as a Software Dependency.⁹

Digital Quality(ies)

After describing the works’ Authoring Platform(s) and Software Dependency(ies), we turned to their Digital Quality(ies), one of two categories that—along with Genre(s)—comparatively describe more aesthetic, formal, and rhetorical aspects of the works. Compared with Authoring Platform(s) and Software Dependency(ies), recording metadata in these fields is a necessarily more critically interpretive act that carries a higher likelihood of overdetermining a work’s future reception.

Digital Quality(ies) describes the digital affordances and formal approaches considered by the author(s) and e-lit community(ies) to be most consequential to the work. It is intended to pair with Genre(s) so that together, the fields capture the e-literary nature of the work as a whole, drawing on descriptive practices that have been historically useful for the e-lit community.¹⁰ Its vocabulary aims to remain software-agnostic and currently includes terms like “hypertext,” “animated,” “interactive,” “generative,” “internet (pre-web),” and “ephemeral.” As an example, for a Twitter bot, we would opt to include “social media” and not include “internet (pre-web),” even though such a bot is clearly using the physical distribution structure of the internet. However, it is not deliberately or critically using that structure as an affordance—rather, it is intentionally using the publishing and distribution technology of a social media platform.

Thus, we faced the question of whether “social media” as an existing term in the controlled vocabulary would be sufficient to capture the myriad ways the Filter authors leveraged the platform technologies of Instagram. Penny Florence’s video UM, for instance, transitions and cuts from scene to scene according to the time constraints of Instagram stories. Similarly, in RoadSurfacesofCypress, Mackay notes that Instagram’s in-app AI chat was the source of poetic inspiration and text for this project, as it intrusively messaged him about self-care following posts of “ugly” images. Finally, xtine burrough’s I Got up 2020 was already an Instagram-based project, as burrough used the social media platform to share daily videos documenting and performing what time of day she got up during the COVID-19 pandemic. For these pieces, we originally determined that the existing digital quality of “social media” was sufficient to capture the authors’ use of Instagram as a technology, as they were clearly considering the formal constraints and the poetic opportunities that Instagram as social media provided.¹¹ However, in hindsight, we wonder if the software-agnostic tendency of the terms within the Digital Quality(ies) field are becoming inadequate to describe the formal constraints and affordances of specific platforms like Instagram. In e-lit’s first and second generations of bespoke code and artisanal interfaces, “hypertext” or “generative” may have been sufficient to denote a work’s formal qualities and leveraged technological affordances. As the e-lit community’s reluctance to erase “Twitter” from “Twitter bot” attests, this new era of platform proliferation requires us to reconsider previous approaches to describing these formal constraints and affordances. It also suggests that we need to update frameworks like ELMS with flexibility and agility, allowing them to evolve alongside e-literary practice.

The existing controlled vocabulary for Digital Quality(ies) did serve to describe many of the remaining qualities for Filter’s first issue.¹² Terms like “AI,” “Animation,” “Blog,” and “Database” captured important qualities for works like Salt & Smoke, Waveforms, and Coronation, each of which, notably, did not originate in Instagram but were instead reformatted for their publication in Filter. However, in our discussions of UM, roadsurfacesofcypress, and I Got up 2020, we still felt we had not sufficiently answered the questions: what is going on with Instagram, and how (if at all) could we fully capture its role for their metadata records? With these questions lingering, we turn from the technological constraints captured by Digital Quality(ies) to discuss the community practices and discursive concerns captured in Genre(s).

Third-Gen Platforms and Genre

This field captures not only literary but also broader artistic genres, through its controlled vocabulary, which includes entries like “poetry,” “installation,” “documentary,” and “game.” As with Digital Quality(ies), here we also chose the term(s) that most clearly identify a work, often using a combination of two or three to achieve the most useful results. In many cases, the existing controlled vocabularies contained natural choices that described many of these pieces quite well. For instance, “video,” “image,” and “performance” all describe generic concerns of burrough’s I Got Up 2020. Similarly, “image” and “webcomic” easily describe the Marino Family’s Coronation, and “looped video” identifies the conventions of Carter’s Waveforms and Amos’ Salt & Smoke.

These simpler decisions aside, we again faced that lingering question: how to account for Instagram. As the platform constitutes a cultural space with clear creative and discursive expectations, we began to ask how it intersects with familiar generic categories to render a work not simply an image, but an Instagram image? Not only a video, but a Reel? Not just a “way to capture moments in motion,” but a Boomerang?

These questions are not only important for e-lit scholars studying Instagram; rather, they get at the core of how a platform functions not only as a set of tools and/or distribution mechanism—as discussed with Authoring Platform(s)—but as a cultural space that cultivates emerging genres. Articulating this distinction, though critical for any study of e-lit, is of particular urgency within e-lit’s third generation given the proliferation of platforms, genres, and practices in this era.

Consider Twine, a platform that epitomizes third-gen e-lit yet remains distinctly not social media. Most would recognize that there is at least one genre of Twine games qua Twine games: works like With Those We Love Alive by Porpentine, Hunt for the Gay Planet by anna anthropy, and a kiss by Dan Waber. Archived through the ELC 3 and 4, these works all exemplify the generic expectations of a Twine game in that they critically invoke mechanisms and tropes common to the community surrounding the platform. At the same time, there are other projects made with Twine that do not engage the platform as a genre. Think, for example, of Chloe Anna Milligan’s review essay, “Playing the Hard Questions: A Review of Blocked in by Anastasia Salter and John Murray,” which uses Twine as an authoring platform for her interactive game review; similarly, Sarah Whitcomb Laiola’s “What I Tok about When I Tok About C0V1D” uses Twine as an authoring platform for an interactive, randomized diary of her COVID-19 experience captured via TikTok video performances. While both these projects engage Twine and its affordances critically, few would refer to them as “Twine Stories” as such. Even fewer would point to them as exemplary uses of Twine—a claim that speaks not to the importance or impact of the work, but rather to the use of Twine as a freely-available, accessible digital (authoring) platform.¹³ Given the role of the platform in third-generation e-lit, we argue that capturing this distinction is critical for effectively and responsibly describing third-generation works in the metadata record.

To illustrate the stakes of this line of questioning for Instagram specifically, consider the role that the platform plays in a piece like burrough’s I Got Up 2020. As noted, this piece performs burrough’s pandemic experience via a daily Instagram post documenting what time the artist got up each day through static images and short-form videos (“Instagram Reels”) paired with short textual captions. On the Instagram account, burrough describes the project as a “#pandemicArt, Insta series inspired by On Kawara’s 1968-79 daily postcard ritual” (our emphasis). The choice of the term “insta series” is significant here. First, as a contemporary analog to a pre-digital “postcard ritual,” it signals burrough’s use of Instagram as more than simply a distribution platform. Like the postcard for On Kawara, Instagram for burrough constitutes a rich textual environment, with formal constraints, cultural expectations, and communication norms that certainly inform and simultaneously far exceed its role as distribution platform. Second, the adjectival “insta” modifying “series” invites us to consider the series as something Instagram-specific for more purposeful reasons than chance and platform availability. Indeed, at the time burrough was creating this series, TikTok was rising to prominence for American audiences, establishing itself as the primary platform for short-form creative videos. Moreover, time on TikTok is experienced differently than on Instagram: the platform hides timestamps, creating an infinite feed of videos divorced from lived temporality. I Got up 2020, by contrast, prompts us to reflect on how we experience time—how temporality becomes lived—an exploration that is effectively impossible on TikTok.

Thus, any metadata record would need to take seriously that burrough has created an Insta series, specifically. Her piece makes critical use of Instagram as more than simply an authoring platform. Could her use of Instagram, here, constitute engaging with some form of genre?

As we delved further into this question, despite the often idiosyncratic nature of e-lit, we recognized the need to locate our working definition of genre within broader scholarly conversation. Genre is notoriously “slippery,” a “fuzzy concept, a loose term of art” to be approached with “trepidation” (Swales 33), not least because the term may be applied in both the very general sense and in very specific situations equally. Considering our questions about Instagram, we were drawn to Carolyn Miller’s understanding of genre as typified social action (1984). In this view, genre reflects the rhetorical experience of the people who create and interpret the discourse. This definition certainly resonates with a work like I Got Up 2020, one entirely contextualized by the Instagram platform and its community(ies).

What’s more, in fact, nearly three decades after Miller made her original argument for a culturalist approach to genre, she notes that it has proven to be extremely applicable to online discourse. The internet is full of emerging genres. What we recognize in works like I Got up 2020, which are clearly addressing a discursive community, is “the shared impression that something is new and that—even in an inchoate state or in diverse forms—it is meaningful, functioning holistically as a cultural unit” (6). We had been engaging the idea of Instagram as genre because on some level we recognized that social media platforms are constantly giving birth to emerging genres, ones defined by the rhetorical experiences of their users.

The common “language” and ways of reading Instagram images, Reels, and Stories suggest them as vernacular genres: they emerge where users “have few institutional or administrative constraints and can collectively create a way of addressing a shared exigence” (Miller 2017, 24-25). Other scholars have recognized these kinds of emerging genres as folk classifications or “folksonomies” (Spinuzzi, Frow qtd. in Miller 2017, 24-25). With platforms like Instagram, especially those replete with capturing and editing tools, “people have the means to do new kinds of things and to do them collectively, so that they can rapidly become joint modes of social action—holistically identifiable, socially meaningful, and reproducible…they emerge and survive when a community finds a configuration of features that satisfies or pleases those who interact together, addressing some communally recognized exigence” (24-25). I Got up 2020, with its narrative grounding in the exigence of COVID-19 and its formal grounding in community expectations of posting to Instagram, clearly participates in some form of emerging vernacular genre as it addresses the pandemic.

While the community-based nature of this participation is clear, in the case of Instagram the community and its joint modes of social action are inextricable from the platform itself. This is the case for most third-generation e-lit. And so the question becomes: can a platform, or any technology, be a genre? This is a pressing question when we remember the enduring nature of the metadata record and its role in (over)determining future reception. Lisa Giltrow’s recent work offered us helpful insight, as she addresses the question of online technology(ies) and genre with regard to blogging and online commenting. For her, the social, rhetorical nature of genre always takes precedence over technological change; she asks, “What are people doing?” (our emphasis, 49) and thus remains skeptical of the degree to which technologies themselves can/should be considered part of genre(s). However, extending from Herring et al., she recognizes that technologies like the blog often constitute bridges to new genres, as users encounter them with an initial flurry of unstructured discursive activity (49). For Giltrow, the technology “carries [people] over” to fully differentiated genres as we might understand them rhetorically: the blog as a technology carries people to the specific rhetorical spaces of “food blog,” “mommy blog,” etc. (49).

To put this in more contemporary terms, in Giltrow’s formulation, short-form videos such as those popularized on TikTok or Instagram Reels would be a technology that bridges users to more specific short-form video genres such as “Get Ready With Me” videos or “Dance Challenges.” The specificity of Instagram or TikTok wouldn’t be important. However, we argue that contemporary social media platforms like Instagram and Tiktok are markedly distinct from the blogs and online comment sections that Giltrow takes as her examples, as they create much more layered and sustained ecosystems of social action.¹⁴ As we critically engaged the works in Filter’s first issue to prepare their metadata, we continued to find that Instagram was more than a platform technology; indeed, it was inextricable from our understanding of their genre(s) as works of e-lit. Thus, while recognizing that the inclusion of platforms or technologies within the “Genre(s)” field would be unconventional—even as the relationship between e-lit and social media platforms remains undertheorized—we opted to capture Instagram in that field for three of the Filter works. While we have already shown that I Got up 2020 takes Instagram as part of its genre given the ways it participates in social action with Reels and regular posting to a feed, roadsurfacesofcyprus and UM offer illustrative examples of the ways Instagram, considered as a technology or platform, participates in genre formation.

Before it became the work of Instagram e-lit that it is today, James Mackay’s roadsurfacesofcyprus began as a photo-sharing exercise that was both aligned with and critical of modes of social action on Instagram. Mackay’s project was one of sharing images tied to a specific location, Cyprus, a move that recalls Instagram’s place in the social media landscape of sharing beautiful pictures in beautiful places. Instagram has cultivated a culture of highly aestheticized photo-sharing, and within this culture, Cyprus itself operates as a kind of platonic ideal—a most “Instagrammable” travel location. The images Mackay shared, however, subverted these generic expectations, and were of the “#banal, #pointless, #featureless, #boring” road surfaces of Cyprus. For Mackay, what changed a project of sharing ugly things on a platform dedicated to beauty from a “somewhat inchoate joke” for “self-amusement” into something more was the intervention of the platform itself. Hypothesizing that his hashtags triggered the platform, Mackay writes in roadsurfacesofcyprus, “Instagram sent me an email that could be paraphrased as ‘You OK, hon?’ along with a list of resources for people experiencing depression and suicidal thoughts.” While we cannot know for sure what triggered Instagram’s intervention, Mackay was clearly participating in ways that ran counter to the platform’s generic expectations for its users. “Ugly” images, captioned only with these hashtags—which as folksonomies themselves would often be connected to a fairly depressing content feed—are far from the idealized Instagram posts of beautiful people in beautiful places, doing beautiful things.

When its automated systems began expressing concern, Mackay was catalyzed to reflect on the impact of the Instagram algorithm on work created for and with the platform: “In the algorithmic future,” proclaims the sixth in a series of images submitted to Filter, “there will be no place to acknowledge the ugly, the banal or the boring” (Mackay). As such, Mackay’s piece is inseparable from the social and technological environment of Instagram at multiple levels. First, roadsurfacesofcyprus subverts typified forms of social action on Instagram, as a project of sharing ugly, banal things. Second, it surfaces the platform’s technological architecture which itself organizes and reflects those typified forms. What Mackay is doing with Cyprus—revealing what should remain invisible, marginalized, even obfuscated—he is also doing with Instagram itself—revealing the technology of the platform as one that does not just enable creative expression, but conditions it. Witnessing Mackay’s engagement with the technology of Instagram made it clear to us that without the platform, this artwork such as it is would not exist; in the first place, the work could not have been created (Authoring Platform) or experienced (Software Dependency), and, in the second place, Instagram’s social expectations and technological substrate are the work of art.

Finally, we turn to Penny Florence’s UM, a work of videographic poetry created using Final Cut Pro X and Stories. Stories are Instagram’s ephemeral content feature that, following Snapchat, limits posts to a fifteen-second maximum duration before jumping to the next frame. Likewise, Stories disappear after 24 hours, providing an experiential contrast to the apparent permanence of content shared via the Instagram feed. In correspondence with Filter’s editors, Florence notes that UM is best understood, perhaps even experienced, through this discursive lens and platform technology: the fifteen-second frame constraint “determined the rhythm of the cuts & internal movements.” While Florence’s original video content edited in Final Cut Pro X was more than twice this length, she contends that the final Instagram Story version is simply better: “The way you understand it is quite different, and so is what you understand…the rhythm is semantic. The meanings shift a little from the linguistic temporality of making meaning to the visual” (our emphasis). Florence connects the ephemeral nature of Stories to fleeting visual experiences: “the way sudden impressions seem to burn themselves into the retina,” like the “indelible snapshot” of a chance encounter with a wild animal. Just as the algorithm actively conditions content in Mackay’s piece, so too does Instagram actively manage encounters with Stories by disappearing their content at set intervals. Instagram thus cultivates the “snapshot” that is part and parcel of UM not only as videopoetry but as Instagram videopoetry.

It is worth noting, however, that for Filter the editors chose not to share UM as a Story, instead sharing it with the rest of the issues’ #TIL works as part of the account’s feed. This move both allowed the text to persist beyond 24 hours and allowed the Filter editors to share it with its accompanying artist’s statement and hashtags, paratexts that appear as part of the Instagram caption. Captions are an impossibility within the Stories interface, yet the paratextual information they contain is important to Filter’s project of hosting and sharing artwork as a publication venue. These choices illustrate some of the challenges surrounding the documentation of third-generation e-lit, and they also suggest once again the degree to which the social and technological environment of Instagram is inextricable from this work’s literariness. While disappearing artworks are not new to e-lit, creating such works within social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat offers a distinct experience for both the author and the reader. William Gibson and Dennish Ashbaugh’s Agrippa: A Book of the Dead (1992) may self-destruct both in the digital and physical sense, but it also leaves remains. Similarly, Snyder’s disappearing web poem elegy (2025) leaves behind a visual “husk” meant to call attention to the poem’s departure. In both cases, the authors were able to manage the experience and, to a degree, anticipate how these remains will prompt future conversation about the work after it has “gone.” This is not the case when working with Instagram Stories, where one essentially cedes control of and access to any “trace” of the piece to the platform and its management.

Reflecting on the inextricability of Instagram from all three of these works as e-literature—I Got up 2020, roadsurfacesofcyprus, and UM—we once again faced the question: what do we do with the platform? Or more precisely, how do we capture the complex relationship between platform technology, modes of social action, and individual artistic expression? After close reading, we had become convinced that the metadata record needed to capture this inextricability for future audiences, and, at least for these three texts, capturing Instagram as “Authoring Platform,” and “Software Dependency,” alongside “social media” as a “Digital Quality,” was simply inadequate.

In the end, we made the decision to record Instagram in the “Genre(s)” field alongside other terms to provide the best possible description for future readers. For I Got up 2020, we included “Instagram” alongside “video,” “image,” and “performance.” For roadsurfacesofcyprus, we recorded it with “video,” and for UM it was entered next to “image.” Recognizing the need to work within the practical constraints of preparing metadata, we found in our exploration of genre and third-gen e-lit that this space best described the relationship between technology and social action for these works. Additionally, the fluidity of genre in the digital age suggested the Genre(s) field as best suited to handle the nuance and complexity of the role played by Instagram for these works, especially as third-gen e-lit continues to emerge. Indeed, though some may resist thinking about Instagram itself as a genre, we argue that these three works occupy a space somewhere within the “bridge” from Instagram-as-technology to differentiated rhetorical genre(s) within social media platforms. As such, omitting Instagram altogether—relegating it only to Authoring Platform or Software Dependency—would be irresponsible. Describing metadata is a necessarily reductive venture, and no schema is likely to contain an “emerging vernacular bridge-to-genre” field. In turn, we have opted to capture the situated reality of these works in Genre(s) given our current understanding of third-generation e-lit.

While we were preparing the metadata record for the Filter exhibition, the question of what to do with Instagram was paramount. However, outside of that specific practical context, grappling with these works of third-generation e-lit, we clearly surfaced wider implications for the field. Our discussion illustrates the extent to which social media platforms need further theorization as literary ecosystems, which will surely lead not only to stronger identities for the e-literary works therein, but also better ways to describe them for future readers.

Works Cited

“@filterinstazine.” Filter Instazine. Instagram, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/filterinstazine. Accessed 24 August, 2023.

“@igotup2020.” xtine. Instagram, 2020. https://www.instagram.com/igotup2020/ Accessed 24, August, 2023.

Amos, Raynen Bajette. “Today’s Instagram Lit | #TIL | #FilterIssue1 / Salt & Smoke // Air and Water; deconstructed meme / “transverse processes” / Part 1 of a 5-part series…” Filter Insta-Zine (@filterinstazine) no. 1, 12 Oct. 2021. https://www.instagram.com/p/CU7gFyEALXK/. Accessed 24 August. 2023.

“An Invitation to Experience: Expanding Access for Disabilities and Sensory Sensitivities.” The NEXT, https://the-next.eliterature.org/exhibition/an-invitation-to-experience/. Accessed 24 August, 2023.

Anthropy, Anna. The Hunt for the Gay Planet. Electronic Literature Collection, vol. 3, Electronic Literature Organization. 2013.

Berens, Kathi Inman. “E‑Lit’s #1 Hit: Is Instagram Poetry E‑literature?” Electronic Book Review, 7 Apr. 2019, https://doi.org/10.7273/9sz6-nj80.

—. “Third Generation Electronic Literature and Artisanal Interfaces: Resistance in the Materials,” Electronic Book Review, 5 May 2019, https://doi.org/10.7273/c8a0-kb67.

burrough, xtine. “Today’s Instagram Lit | #TIL | #FilterIssue1 / I Got Up 2020, Pandemic Edition/ “Late start. Tequila last night.” / Part 1 of 11-part series excerpted from @igotup2020…” Filter Insta-Zine (@filterinstazine) no. 1, 15 Oct, 2021. “https://www.instagram.com/p/CVDNzLUrGn_/”

Carter, Richard. “Today’s Instagram Lit | #TIL | #FilterIssue1 / Waveforms 1 / Richard A Carter…” Filter Insta-Zine (@filterinstazine) no. 1, Oct. 14, 2021. https://www.instagram.com/p/CVAo74BpoaY/. Accessed 24 August, 2023.

—. “Waveform.” Richard A. Carter, 2019, https://richardacarter.com/waveform/. Accessed 24 August. 2023.

“CFP: Emerging Spaces for E-Lit Creations.” Eliterature.org, 25 Sep. 2020, https://eliterature.org/2020/09/cfp-emerging-spaces-for-e-lit-creations/.

“Coronation webcomic.” Mark C. Marino, 17 March, 2020, http://markcmarino.com/wordpress/creative-works/coronation-webcomic.

Douglas, J. Yellowlees. I Have Said Nothing, 1993, 3.5-inch Floppy, The NEXT, https://the-next.eliterature.org/works/1100/0/0/. Accessed 24 August, 2023.

“ELC 4 Index.” Electronic Literature Collection, https://collection.eliterature.org/4/index. Accessed August 24, 2023.

“Electronic Literature Collection Volume 4.” Electronic Literature Collection, https://collection.eliterature.org/4/. Accessed 24 August, 2023.

“Electronic Literature Knowledge Base.” ELMCIP, https://elmcip.net/. Accessed 24 August, 2023.

“Extended eLectronic Metadata Schema.” The NEXT, https://the-next.eliterature.org/elms. Accessed 24 August, 2023.

Filter Insta-Zine (@filterinstazine) no. 1, https://www.instagram.com/p/CU47IbnLJSn/. Accessed 24 August, 2023.

“Filter Insta-Zine: Instagram Storytelling and Zine Culture.” The NEXT, 1 Apr. 2022, https://the-next.eliterature.org/exhibition/filter/.

Florence, Penny. “Today’s Instagram Lit | #TIL | #FilterIssue1 / UM / Penny Florence…” Filter Insta-Zine (@filterinstazine) no. 1, 16 Oct. 2021. https://www.instagram.com/p/CVF5eCBgt__/ Accessed 24, August 2023.

Flores, Leonardo. “Third Generation Electronic Literature.” Electronic Book Review. 7 Apr., 2019, https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/third-generation-electronic-literature/

Gibson, William, and Dennis Ashbaugh. Agrippa: A Book of the Dead. Kevin Begos Jr. Publishing, 1992.

Giltrow, Janet. “Bridges to Genre: Spanning Technological Change.” Emerging Genres in New Media Environments, edited by Carolyn R. Miller and Ashley R. Kelly, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Grigar, Dene, et al. “Michael Joyce’s ‘afternoon, a story.’” Rebooting Electronic Literature, vol. 3. Nouspace Publications. https://the-next.eliterature.org/works/2483/0/0/

“Home.” Electronic Literature Directory, https://directory.eliterature.org. Accessed 24 August, 2023.

“Introducing CELL.” Cell Project, https://cellproject.net/. Accessed 24 August, 2023.

Laiola, Sarah Whitcomb. “What I Tok About When I Tok About C0V1D.” What I Tok About When I Tok About C0V1D. Interactive Twine Project. Projects in Digital Media & Arts, University of Central Florida, 2022.

Mackay, James. ​​“Today’s Instagram Lit | #TIL | #FilterIssue1 / RoadSurfacesOfCyprus / James Mackay…” Filter Insta-Zine (@filterinstazine) no. 1, 13 Oct. 2021. https://www.instagram.com/p/CU-E5T8L1E2/. Accessed 24 August, 2023.

Marino Family. “Today’s Instagram Lit | #TIL | #FilterIssue1 / Coronation Vol. 6 / Part 1 of 10 / The Marino Family…”. Filter Insta-Zine (@filterinstazine) no. 1, Oct. 11, 2021. https://www.instagram.com/p/CU5BWT0sArU/. Accessed 24 August. 2023.

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Perez, Sarah. “Instagram is Adding ‘Collabs,’ New Music Features for Reels, Desktop Posting and More.” Tech Crunch, 19 Oct. 2021, https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/19/instagram-is-adding-collabs-new-music-features-for-reels-desktop-posting-and-more/.

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Footnotes

1. See: MySpace, Google+, or Vine. ↩

2. As was the case for TikTok on January 19, 2025 in the United States. ↩

3. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the cases of Meta in 2025 and Twitter/X following its purchase by Elon Musk in 2023. ↩

4. This is well documented; see specifically Flores, Berens, Saum-Pascual. ↩

5. We distinguish here between initiatives of the electronic literature organization and those implemented by journals such as The New River, which have categorized and described their own works in myriad ways. ↩

6. See, e.g., “Electronic Literature Collection Volume 4.” ↩

7. It is important to capture in their metadata that these works appeared along with one another in the publication Filter. Though placing them within the Filter exhibition (or a future collection) gestures to this association, a planned update to ELMS makes possible more granular groupings by publication. ↩

8. Consider a work created in Adobe Flash: it does not require Adobe Flash itself to run, but rather a web browser and the Flash plugin. Another example would be a work created with Inky and exported for readers to access via the web. This piece would have Inky listed as Authoring Platform, but its Software Dependency would be “web browser.” ↩

9. Because Authoring Platform(s) and Software Dependency(ies) fields are related to hardware and software, and since in this case we needed to reckon with the works as they appeared in Filter, it may be tempting to consider a conversation around these fields to be obvious, and therefore less insightful or compelling than the more artistic fields like Digital Quality(ies) or Genre(s). However, one can clearly see that very little is “obvious” about a work and its relationship to hardware and software, particularly in the context of social media platforms and third-generation e-lit. ↩

10. For example, combining the Digital Quality of “hypertext” with the genre of “memoir” to produce “hypertext memoir” gives a sense of both technological functionality/form and rhetorical purpose. Scholars have often used this approach when writing about or creating keywords to describe e-lit works. ↩

11. Indeed, once again this is a quality we attributed to all of the works in the exhibition, given that we were capturing metadata for their specific instantiations in Filter, a social media journal. ↩

12. Given that Instagram was, as of the works’ creation, a platform exclusive to mobile devices, we also selected “mobile” as a digital quality, again pulling from the existing vocabulary. In the case of I Got up 2020, Pandemic Edition, we also wanted to capture how burrough evokes and shares a sense of moment-to-moment existence with the user—an aspect that was all the more powerful for the “Pandemic Edition,” as it speaks to burrough’s intentional use of Instagram for this project. In a pre-BeReal social media ecosystem, the “insta-” in Instagram is an invitation, even interpolation, to share visual content instantly, in the moment, as if “live”—a technological affordance of the modern social media era. This is precisely the rhetorical space that burrough’s I Got up 2020, Pandemic Edition performance occupies. Therefore, we made the decision to add a digital quality—liveness—to this controlled vocabulary in ELMS in order to capture this element of the work, again remaining software-agnostic in our additions. ↩

13. See Moulthrop and Salter, 18-19. ↩

14. This difference is really driven home in the classroom. As instructors, we recognize clearly the unique character of these third-gen spaces when we assign students to work within their discursive and technological constraints. ↩