Instagram Video and the Death of Fantasy

Over the weekend, I went to a sunset picnic on a rooftop in Brooklyn. The evening couldn’t have been more picturesque — a group of stylish women chatting and lounging on blankets, framed against a lavender and glittering cityscape. I pulled out my phone to capture the moment. I opened Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, and turned on the company’s new feature that lets people upload short videos in addition to photographs. I tried to document the carefully arranged snacks and decorations and capture the liveliness of the mood, but what I got instead was a grainy video of dresses and hair, whipped around by the wind, music thumping from a party next door and snippets of a conversation about birth control. Last week, when Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, and Kevin Systrom, the chief executive of Instagram, introduced the new video-sharing feature, they described it as the future of memory, a way to capture the moments an