The way we share our lives is changing. Open Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram—and TikTok and we’re greeted with the “stories” of everyone we follow: brief flashes of photos or videos from the user’s past 24 hours. Words are being replaced by images that tell a vivid story. The goal is to make our social media profiles as much like real life as possible–quick visual glimpses into the normal day-to-day. Spurred by Snapchat, the other social media platforms quickly realized that technology needed to shift as we share more and more of our lives. Stories are now widespread across most popular social media platforms, and although it was originally a Snapchat concept, the other platforms quickly realized that it’s better to be a copycat than to be a has-been. Plus these photo and video story platforms also make it easy to document the and share the story as it unfolds.