So long Vine, your six seconds of internet fame are over A day after announcing it was cutting 9 per cent of its staff, Twitter has added more woes to its workers by announcing it will be closing the Vine mobile app. Twitter bought Vine back in 2012, shortly before it officially launched, and it caught on, gaining at least 200 million users and making some users internet famous. The …
I find it amusing when socially oblivious beancounters try to monopolise culture that they really don't understand or care about.
Of course it ceases to be amusing once they fail, taking a little peice of our culture with them to the grave.
Vine worked, culturally if not economically, because it was what the users wanted. They made it, organically and as a natural expression of their culture. It was one of those seemingly trivail and peurile creative outlets, that in hindsight we will eventually claim was important, in a sense that the profit-oriented mindset is institutionally incapable of grasping: It's the little things that make life worth living, not only irrespective of financial gain, but usually in direct contradiction to it.
Attempting to be the gatekeeper to something like that is frankly rather sinister, and was always doomed to failure. Those people are still there, they will always be there, and they will always need a creative outlet makes no economic sense, but will always be culturally essential.
I remember this kind of techno-utopianism from the 1990s. There's a good argument for Youtube - without Youtube there would be no Cyriak, no Alantutorial, no Glozell Green etc. But Youtube is heavily monetised and indeed the site's leading content providers rely on this monetisation to become Youtube millionaires. It makes whores of everybody, but that is true of life itself; some whores are more entertaining than others.
Besides, you're talking about art as if didn't have a commercial dimension. Art has always had a commercial dimension. Van Gogh didn't sell many paintings - but he did try to sell them. He took commissions and would have been thrilled to be exhibited in a major gallery. We know his work today entirely because it is commercial exploitable - the same is true of Vivian Maier and Bill Hicks. They achieved enormous audiences after they died because they were marketed effectively, and also because being dead the rights were cheaper.
Without the competitive pressure of having to make money you either end up with floods of weak crap, as per DeviantART, or you end up with esoteric stuff that exists in its own little world; which is fine, but the major visionaries of this world are tough people with iron wills, they take what they want. They exist outside the real of discussion.
Twitter and Vine as a vital creative platform / archive for future cultural commentators is a hard sell. The 140-character limit is horrible. Perhaps some writers can thrive with that constraint; but only a handful. In the long run Twitter will go the way of fanzines from the past, or the letters pages in old newspapers. All of Twitter might be archived somewhere, but no-one will read it and historians will skip past it because it's just random noise.
This story reminds me of the Breugel painting, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus."
It's a seaside pastoral scene on a lovely spring day. In the lower right corner, Icarus -- having flown too close to the sun and melted his wings -- plunges to his death in the sea. No one notices his legs disappearing below the water...
As W H Auden wrote in Musee des Beaux Arts ...
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
There were some inspired and creative jokes/stories told in those few seconds but someone had the idea of changing the time limit to ten seconds (probably after the writing was on the wall).
A one-liner joke does not need to be told over two.
There were some great vines, made me laugh but I preferred watching the compilations on youtube.
Amanda Cerny wasn't even that funny, I just don't know why she was popular, honest I don't.
That's exactly how I feel but I could not have said it that well :)
People enjoy buying into buzzwords. I think it's the way they interact these days, it's all about that feeling of being the first one to bring something new to the party. That's why when something happens, it's posted 10,000 times on social media because for a split second each one of them get that feeling they are the one bringing that bit of news to the world, look at me I did it first etc. When a new thing comes along most people don't care. Unless it has a catchy name, then it spreads like wildfire and everyone wants a piece.
Why is twitter even a thing? Why not just post shorter messages on facebook? I have no clue to be honest, I don't use either of them so they look the same to me, just a platform for people to pretend to be the person they wish they were. I think twitter became a thing because people wanted to participate in the buzzword.
To me it's just half way between tw*t and sh*tter.
Yeah, that's how I feel about it, sorry.
OK so some time you'll have to bleach your frontal lobes
Here's the thing.
The internet has a surfeit of bozos who reckon they've got an idea that's going to change the world because people like what they like and somehow they will make money off of it.
It's like they saw the South Park episode "underpants" episode and did not realize the Matt and Trey were poking fun at Cartman's stupidity, not suggesting you follow it.
It's like they saw the South Park episode "underpants" episode and did not realize the Matt and Trey were poking fun at Cartman's stupidity, not suggesting you follow it.
This is pretty common these days. Far too many people do not realize the message is "this is stupid, don't do this thing."
Far too many.
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