existential vine thoughts
In honor of the last full day of Vine, I want to talk more about what Vine has meant to me for the last four years, and further explain my fascination with this medium of creative expression. I have several friends with whom I would regularly create Vines when the application first emerged. On one level, making Vine videos was a hobby. It changed my perspective on things when I used it as a tool for documentation; I began to see humor and wonder in moments in terms of the potential that they might have to come to life with the ability to record. I often secretly grappled with the idea that creating a Vine perhaps could "pull me out of the moment," and sometimes felt self-conscious filming small vignettes at concerts or while hanging out with my friends. It has been interesting for me in recent weeks and months to look back at my old Vines, because the reality is that 6 seconds is plenty of time to transport someone's memory to a time and place. I realized looking back that most of the moments I have captured on Vine come from days and moments that I would never think about anymore if I didn't have the ability to see it replayed. I'm thinking about what Vine means then, in terms of memory. When I recorded Vines in the past, they were moments that I wanted to capture. Does that make these memories more important than all of my other ones because of the decision that I made to capture them, or are only they important to me now because I recorded them? Where is the value; in the creation of a video, or in its replay? Does the value of a Vine increase with the more effort that was put into its creation, or does it increase the more often it is replayed and repurposed? I have no idea how it feels to create Vines in order to cultivate a following; there are obviously many different ways to use Vine, and people have different desires when it comes to content curation. In recent years, I have used my Vine account to curate the works of others with the revine function. I now primarily use Vine more for comedic relief than a creative outlet or as a way to curate memories, as Snapchat and Instagram have evolved to fulfill creative and curatorial desires. I am fascinated with Vine as a comedic platform for many reasons, one being the vastly wide range of content available. There is so much content on Vine it's kind of overwhelming; one of the reasons why I can't use Vine too often is because it has a "black-hole" effect, as does much of the media that we use today that involves scrolling down a feed. Vine's black-hole-like tendencies to suck my attention in for long periods of time also stem from the unseen potential that every post has. Although I don't find every single post that I scroll past funny or stimulating, the possibility that the next one might have me in stitches keeps me attentive for hour-long periods of time where I am fully immersed in Vine's strange, virtual world full of tiny little realities and unrealities.