Just five months old, the new app, Vine, has already been flying off the virtual shelves of the App Store. Twitter’s six-second animation maker is only on version 1.1.2, yet it has already slipped into the number 1 free app spot on iTunes. Twitter first acquired the app last October and then launched it in late January.
According to the app’s description on iTunes, “Vine is the best way to see and share life in motion. Create short, beautiful, looping videos in a simple and fun way for your friends and family to see.” The app is similar to Instagram because you can scroll through a feed of all your friends’ Vines on the home screen. Another familiarity is the display of affection, as hitting 11 or more coveted “likes” results in a number of likes instead of a list of “likers.”
The app first surfaced on the public’s radar when videos of the first few moments of the Boston Marathon bombing went viral. Soon after, lighter six-second videos like “Ryan Gosling Just Won’t Eat His Cereal,” which captures the hunk in different movie scenes on a TV while the “Viner” humorously attempted to feed him cereal through the screen.
“Vines” are self-recorded slices of life, and all files are raw and created with the touch of a button. They automatically stop recording when you remove your finger from the screen, so you can combine multiple snippets that only last six seconds when spliced together.
“Vine is a more personal Instagram because you can both hear them and see them. The app lets you really get a sense of people’s personalities,” says Adeline Dubov ’15.
These new apps and social media sources are increasing rapidly, creating an infinitely long list of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Buzzfeed, and more, taking away the value of one another. For students in particular, the app is yet another reason to procrastinate. Instead of studying for their Latin quizzes, kids are scrolling down the news feeds of Instagram, Facebook, and Vine while being notified by new iChat messages. These distractions are making it harder for kids to focus, and they can even play into being the cause of a student’s academic slip.
Young people are grabbing for their iPhones when they see something worth sharing, whether it’s a beautiful sunset, the process of making homemade cookies, or their bubble baths. Rather than living moments, we’re recording them.