Instagram's vertical format reshapes visual culture and perception of time

Marco Senaldi analyzes how Instagram's vertical screen orientation disrupts centuries of horizontal visual tradition, from painting to cinema. He argues that vertical scrolling creates a 'waterfall' effect, replacing linear, horizontal time with a cascading, accumulative temporality. Senaldi notes that while horizontal formats (16:9, 4:3) dominate art and media history, smartphones have normalized verticality for social media, only switching to horizontal for long videos. He invokes Victor Stoichita's 'The Invention of the Picture' (2004) and Pierre Sorlin's 'scopic regime', suggesting this shift is not merely aesthetic but signals a deeper dimensional inversion. The vertical cascade metaphor, drawn from Andrew Dotey, Hassan Rom, and Carmen Vaca's 'Information Diffusion in Social Media' (2011), describes how new content perpetually overlays old, creating a frozen, co-present space. Senaldi cites artist Bill Viola as a precursor who used vertical screens, presaging this medial condition. The article concludes that hypermodernity replaces temporal flow with spatial contradiction, echoing Augustine's paradox of time and space.