Quick thought on Vines

Admittedly I don’t spend all day on Vines or meme sites like some of my friends, but I still catch a fair share of them and if I am in the mood (or extremely drunk) I can binge on them for a bit.

So what are Vines?

No, not these.

In this day and age it’s easy to get behind on what the latest and greatest thing is via the internet, and by all means Vines could be considered old.  In fact, I bet several people reading this are already scoffing, thinking to themselves, “Who the hell doesn’t know what a vine is?  Vines are so last year.”

Vines are six second (sometimes seven) videos about anything, everything, and absolutely nothing.  They are a novelty in modern media storytelling.  While naysayers point to them as a sign of the internet generations ever shortening attention span, I see them as a storytelling challenge that many people have accepted.  When only given six seconds to create something engaging or funny what would you do?  Some Vines fall flat on their face while others can make you laugh out loud at the absurdity of it all.  I feel like the extreme limitations Vines put on content creators forces them to think outside of the box and since the viewer only loses six seconds of their life, creators can put riskier ideas into their video without much penalty.

Here’s a video of a Vine compilation to help catch you up to speed.  Some of the Vines are simply comedic, some showcase magic, and some even critique modern society.  I feel like as this shortened form of storytelling evolves we are going to get some really interesting ideas out of them and hopefully storytellers will learn from them and cut out some of the fluff and hone in on a more direct train of thought.  So what I’m saying is, that by creating shorter, more free form content, we may be sharpening our skills for us in creating deeper and more powerful stories when applied in other arenas.

Just some food for thought.

Johnny Townsend

Staff Writer

Koala@ihogeek.com