It’s interesting to see how after just three short years of its initial launch in January of 2013, Vine has integrated itself into mainstream culture without the skip of a beat. Vine has surprisingly contributed positively, and sometimes negatively, to society than just making you laugh at a girl who fell off a chair trying to twerk or a little boy named Darius who does NOT want to be tickled.
Besides giving you the giggles, “Viners” have been utilizing the 200 million monthly active users as a means of advertising and marketing their own name. In the realm of social media, only about 11 percent of the population use vine. Of that 11 percent, most advertising is directed towards the youngest demographic of 14-to-17-year-olds, considering they make up about 32% of Vine’s viewership, according to eMarketer.
So many young people on Vine are becoming famous because they are able to market themselves directly to the people they are most inclined to reach. For example, Shawn Mendes started his career on Vine posting videos of himself singing covers or original songs on the guitar, and gained himself over 3.8 million followers. This fame led him to a record deal with Island Records last summer. Now, his song “Stiches”, has become so popular it is currently being played on the radio. His incredible feat allowed him to reach a dream that might not have happened without the help from Vine; or at least not nearly as quickly as it did for him.
Vine creates opportunities for these up-and-coming stars to be in commercials, tv shows, or even movies. Cameron Dallas, an active Viner, landed the lead role in the movie “Expelled”, which was released on Netflix in December 2014. With over 7.3 millions followers, Dallas has cultivated quite the Vine account, generating plenty of attention through his collaboration with other popular Viners such as Marcus Johns, Christian Delgrosso, and Rudy Mancuso.
Due to specific vines that have become popular, overtime society has adopted them to become a part of our culture. Such as the trending vine that started “What are those?!” Or the ever popular “deez nutz” video. When vine initially began, people would always say, “do it for the vine,” followed doing something crazy. Popular viner Lele Pons “did it for the vine” when she threw a pie in a bride’s face after she got married, undoubtedly enraging the woman for ruining her bridal pictures.
Even in this year’s Lagniappe Potporri, “John Cena” was declared during an interlude between skits, from the popular trend of vines setting up the joke by asking or stating who ever the person is, and then calling them John Cena with videos of him wrestling people.
The negative aspect about vine is that it allows for people’s attention span to become shorter and shorter. The six second videos are training our brains to tune in for a brief period of time, so that now, if something takes longer than a moment to understand, or laugh, or facilitate any emotion, we tend to tune out.
Another problem with Vine humor, is that basically anything can be made funny. Something so random like a guy yelling “Look! It’s a watermelon, inside a watermelon!” can become so utterly famous, just because the guy pronounces watermelon in a funny voice. It waters down the creativity of humor to six seconds of immediate, slapstick jokes that require zero comprehension.