Give Me All of Your Attention: A History of Micro Video

A start

The past decade provided a marvelous technological innovation in the smartphone: a traveling internet machine that makes communication, organization, and entertainment portable. Smartphone digital functionality is had in a host of self contained inventions called applications. This paper examines an app tool called micro video, a 6–30 second video loop intended to entertain. Entertainment is ubiquitous; the TV set is on in the waiting room of your doctor’s office, a Youtube tutorial is watched on the train to work, the movie theater contains your first date, a Broadway musical the second. Smart technology liaisons this high demand for entertainment, making the availability of a connection to the world outside of oneself so within reach that cultural A.D.D. has forced new media to adapt. “Mobile video overtook desktops in 2017 as the dominant form of online video, and as viewers become increasingly mobile, videos are adapting to match shortened attention spans and instant gratification. The future of marketing is online video, and the future of online video is micro content.” (Forno)

Shortness is now shorter when it comes to online entertainment. The popularity of quick content exemplified in micro video (Snapchat, Vine, TikTok), the 2 minute song (Houdini, Gooba, Ilomilo), and the 45 minute movie (King Cobra, 47 Meters Down) is, at the very least, noticeable. However, longness also seems to be longer (unfortunately). “The[…]biggest blockbusters, Batman v Superman and X-Men: Apocalypse, were both over 145 minutes long and several critics took issue with the 146 minute runtime in the otherwise excellently reviewed Captain America: Civil War.”(Fussell) If bloated super movies weren’t enough, vlogs and grwm (get ready with me) videos on Youtube can last 45+ minutes and albums or podcasts, now emblazoned by limitless streaming capability, can also be monstrous time consumers.

The confusingly non-linear nature of attention is to be expected because, like all economies, it is unpredictable. “Capitalism has gotten hip to the fact that for all our talk of an information economy, what we really have is an attentional economy, if the term “economy” applies to what is scarce and therefore valuable.” (Crawford) The economics of attention are no different than that of the fiscal. The idiom, “the bigger, the better”, is an applicable explanation for longer content, albeit a not so cost effective strategy. However, the supply and demand of new entertainment caused by flighty attention spans is resulting in assimilation of product. That’s a good thing for waste management. Micro video is easy and fast to produce and has a significantly lower carbon footprint than a tv show or movie, which uses a gargantuan amount of energy. But what of the digital waste? How does micro video fair under the lens of transient cultural concentration (the probable culprit of digital pollution)?

2010

The new decade brought a surge in social media production. Youtube videos were picking up in popularity, Facebook is on the way to becoming Darth Vader, and Twitter is talked about on TV every five seconds. “Twitter gained popularity as a tool for following people and being followed by other people and expanded from there. Twitter watched what its users did with its original concept and formalized the conversational behaviors they invented… only then, and after going public, did it start to become more assertive. It made more recommendations. It started reordering users’ feeds based on what it thought they might want to see, or might have missed. Opaque machine intelligence encroached on the original system.” (Herrmann). This virus-like digital example reads like a 90's political satire. Villainous technocratic megacorporations, like Facebook and Twitter (although Twitter was originally a self-startup intended for exclusive use by major conglomerates), gain world domination through brainwashing the masses. A cliche often exists with good reason. The darker side of digital innovation is perpetuated by The Social Network, but does not originate in 2010. It is a continuation of the dot com boom, Myspace, chatrooms, and forums; refinement of internet socialization commodification. At the end of the year, Facebook (the figurehead of online domination) creates Instagram, a future reposting heaven for micro video and the stronghold on social media expands. The popularization of online socialization inspires new start-up companies to, perhaps more idealistically, throw their hat in the ring.

2011

The Snapchat app was licensed at the end of 2011 by Stanford grads under the moniker Snapchat, Inc. The logo for Snapchat is an illustration of a ghost called “ghostface chillah”, a pun of the renowned Wu Tang Clan rapper, Ghostface Killah. This ghost goofily represents the app’s purpose: to facilitate the transience of communication in the ’10's. The impermanence of the 5–15 second long videos made inside the app would either be sent person to person or displayed in a daily journal. This journal would be visible for 24 hrs and then vanish, hence its ghostly nature 👻, thus becoming the first digitally sustainable usage of micro video.

The utility of Snapchat slightly varies with user groups and time. At first, the user experience was similar to AOL instant messenger, where communication was semi-immediate and an entire conversation would be had within exchanges of text or video responses. The conversation turns are expressed in either a self facing video format, like a chopped up Skype chat, or a still photo with text and emojis. The themes of these image conversations varied from the mundane, to sexual, to indignant. Chats would display typical cordiality among friends or new lovers. A, “Hey”-“Hey hru?” is shared under the downward angle of the camera. However, the covert appeal of the app is the exchange of nudes. You send each other dick/pussy pics and they disappear without a trace, making them perfect for avoiding leaks. Many fights were also had on Snapchat. Recordings of altercations in parking lots and McDonald's driveways were posted to the delight of users clamoring for retroactive adrenaline via digital consumption.

In contrast to the aforementioned uses, Snapchat was utilized for political purposes as well (a trend that would continue throughout future micro video platforms). It would be remiss of this paper not to mention the Arab Spring of 2011 when the Tunisian and Egyptian uprising overthrew their respective oppressive governments. The documentation of the riots in Egypt, Yemen, Syria, etc. were primarily seen on social media. News programs were showing Snapchat footage and Twitter posts before their own because of the relative speed of availability on social media platforms. This huge digital accomplishment is historically vital to the advancement of the technology. The significance of this both alters the attention economy by shortening the time elapsed between event and exposure, as well as shortening the length of that exposure, making it more sustainable. The popularity of recording protests and civil rights violations has made micro video the marker of common Smart digital practice now vital to Global existence.

2012

The originator of solely entertainment based micro video is Vine. The platform for original content was released in 2012 by Virtual Labs, a small tech company started by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll. The Vine moniker evokes a connection between clips whether they are short cuts within a single video or the connection of all videos posted. This endeavor started out in that aforementioned idealistic way, but Vine was bought by Twitter only six months post-launch. At first, the app was only available for Iphone users, but eventually was developed for Android. The specs and confines of Vine’s interface were 6 second videos with stop motion capability and hold to record functionality. As with Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, users accrue followers; potentially unlocking digital fame, and eventually lucrativity. When opened, the home page displayed subscribed users’ content with a secondary discover window.

The post’s topics were typically comedy oriented, similar to that of memes. The content styles, “When you’re… (performing a task or in a state of mind)”, in which a sarcastic, ironic, or blatantly earnest description of an action’s contents is relayed, and the short conversation in hyperbole by multiple characters (performed by the creator in wigs or towels on their head) were invented within the progression of the app. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram were all breeding grounds for Trolls and Memetic Warriors to steal and repost Vines either ironically, sarcastically, or ingenuously. This upcycling of content perhaps sustainably deals with the digital trash or general output of Vine. It certainly expanded the audience of the videos, altering the kind of attention paid.

The content released on Vine was subject to less censorship, as was typical on other platforms like Tumblr and Twitter. You could post 6 seconds of a strip tease (Magic Mike was very popular at the time), masturbation, or full on sex. There was even an “adult” video featured as “video of the day” on the Vine homepage. Porn stars could feature teasing content, promoting viewers to cam with them or buy full length content. Some users, like Bravo Delta, got a start in porn because of having popular vines. The micro method of content creating was great advertising.

That potential ad spot was not overlooked by the corporate world. Companies would eventually premier products on the platform, making them known first by Vine users. Dr. Pepper and Arby’s debuted new sodas and sandwiches to great ambivalence, and at a fraction of the cost of a TV or Facebook commercial. This led to Vine’s reputation of providing high return on investment because the production costs were minimal and exposure was very high.

Another unique facet of Vine was the continuation of the black digital paradigm (i.e. Black Vine). Like Black Twitter, the emergence of a parallel sphere of black creators created a specific community. This made room for many cross-over Viners to great success. So much so, that the commonality of reaching pinnacle popularity as an African American wasn’t just possible, it was likely. The users Jay Versace, Lee Lee, and Summerella were just a handful of uber popular black Viners. Later on KingBach would reach the Vine apex. “Not only was KingBach the most followed black Viner, he was able to pass Nash Grier to become the most followed person on the app.” (Renee)

As regular Vine was gaining popularity in comedy and advertising realms, Virtual Labs created Vine Music. In this subapp users can either sing original content or lip sync to a song of their choice. This appealed to emerging musicians not unlike Justin Bieber (who was discovered on Youtube). Sumerella and Summer Walker both showcased their music on the app. This karaoke/singer-songwriter style had more international appeal and was a precursor to the future of micro video content; once again morphing the attention economy.

2013–2017

Vine seemed to have infinite reach; comedy, pornography, art, and discourse. A continuation of political documentation was venerated (just like it did in Snapchat). For example, the 2013 Boston marathon bombing was recorded live and published simultaneously on the platform, as was the Occupy Wall Street protest and the protests in Missouri after the murder of Mike Brown by police officers. The concentrated attention paid to social disaster and human rights violations inside of micro video posts made evidence publicly available in permanence; the innovation of spectatorship turning into activism.

In 2014 the Iphone 6 introduced slow-mo capability that was frequently used in Vine videos. The updated zoom function (volume up during recording) was also a major development in micro-video creativity. One such trendy use of those new functions on Vine was “girl slow-mo walking, camera zooms on her butt, men react in excitement”. This tech variation helped further micro-video’s success, making Vine ‘most downloaded of 2014’.

Vine was the meeting place for future YouTube stars, the ‘Vlog Squad’, and the infamous ‘Team 10 House’. These reality show style creative teams consisted of Viners who interacted at conventions or within the app. The users collaborated on Vines and eventually signed contracts to live together and document their lives, with a clause to post three videos a week. There was endless transience and rejection.

The Team 10 house was started by Jake Paul and his brother Logan. The two hired a manager named Armani (convicted of stabbing a woman who worked for him) and a house coordinator, Austin. The cast members included the ever so debonair, Tana Mongeau and James Charles clone, Cole Sprouse. This bad boy house spewed suicide forest prank videos and rampant offensive humor, which obviously led to a lot of controversy and even more success. The Logan brothers evolved their popularity from Vine, to Youtube, to a boxing career (if you can believe it). Tana Mongeau had her own Fyre Festival in Tanacon, a convention for fans of digital video content that left thousands of young white people dehydrated and badly sunburned while they waited in line to no avail. The controversy continues to this day with MTV reality shows and podcasts, emitting much trash and garnering voracious attention.

The seemingly more wholesome version of the digital reality house is the Vlog Squad (a similarly transient and hyper productive reality show born out of Vine). David Dobrik, the leader of this future empire, had success in normie Vine (the solely humor based bro section of micro video). He gathered up as many creators as possible at Vidcon and started the most successful version of a digital Real World to the chagrin of tweenage girls and white guys in their 20s. That’s the thing, bro humor, is the most appealing because it is the most common and, therefore, the most successful. Dobrik and his rotating crew are now literal millionaires.

In the beginning of 2017, Vine died. It simply could not keep up with the much more monetizable and flexible Instagram video function (IG video had 15 seconds of recording time versus Vine’s 6 seconds). There was an internet archive of Vines made prior to it shutting down, as well as a short lived Vine camera function on Twitter. The success of the archive is proven in the countless compilation videos of beloved Vines on both YouTube and Pornhub. Vine is definitely the most beloved micro video application.

2018–2020

TikTok is slightly different. Instead of an ambitious start-up company selling an app to a conglomerate, this app is more like Instagram in that it was started by a large company; the difference is the country of origin. TikTok was invented in China by ByteDance (the owner of Music.ly and other singing and choreography based apps) originally under the name Douyin. Douyin sternly complied with China’s censorship standards (some of which are also applied to international versions). The other biggie difference is the mechanics are constant, there are no breaks. As soon as you open the app, the videos start and, instead of a personalized feed upon activation, the user is given a ‘For You’ page with suggested content; subscribed channels have secondary access. “What’s both crucial and easy to miss about TikTok is how it has stepped over the midpoint between the familiar self-directed feed and an experience based first on algorithmic observation and inference.” (Herrmann)

After the American launch, the topics of content did not stray far from the dances and challenges posted in China. Viral dance styles and slow motion karaoke were repetitively mirrored (millions of times) by cosplayers, otaku, furries, and vampires (also cops for some reason 🤷). It was a good way to prove your makeup abilities, your sexiness via chin stroking, or your uwu factor (an emoticon meaning cute); uwu has progressed linguistically to define a specifically girlish and youthful anime aesthetic. The song, “I Gotta Hit That” and its attached ‘pose challenge’ dance was an early plague/favorite of the old TikTok audience. The popularity among, shall we say, ‘nerds’ mixed with the visibility in advertising garnered a spectator fan base. That is, people were watching and making fun of the content. Cringe compilations became viral and this jettisoned TikTok’s popularity even more than advertising did.

This cringe factor applies to eastern content as well. There are a multitude of American cringe compilations of specifically Indian content. The jokes in these micro videos are similar to Charlie Chaplin and Three Stooges style comedy with sped up frame rates and pratfalls. Another laughed-at-post in India is the ‘hand slowly waving away facial expressions to synchronized music’ challenge. These comedic styles are antiquated but successful in making the viewer laugh. Russian TikTok style parallels India in a similarly cringey way. The videos begin with a couple walking and some combination of an implied fight or argument ensues, wherein the original couple is interrupted by one or two onlookers until the original couple is reunited, all in slow motion. The incorporation of international posts in preceding Tiktok viewership widens digital trash reuse in cringe format. This lengthens the longevity of content while simultaneously shortening attention paid to an individual post and lengthening the attention paid to searching through those posts.

Black users may have considerable potential exposure on TikTok, but Black Vine had more clout. Although the TikTok for you page has daily trending uploads from black users, there isn’t as much of a scene as there was in Vine; there is no ‘Black TikTok’. However, most of the viral dance challenges are performed to black songs and contain black dance moves, but the people that do them are majority white. I think this is because you can now get your black content from non-black users. In a still racist country, black culture has become so popular that there is less of a need for black people. The utilization of black anthropological signaling performs a dog whistling cry for attention from the respective economy as proof of their proximity to coolness, nowness, and on trend expression (i.e. black music, dance, language, etc.).

Lesbians have a presence here. There is an abundance of teenage lesbians doing the challenge style content as well as morphing pre-existing TikTok‘s to fit or express Gay culture. The tops versus bottoms explanation is seen in various hilarious posts. Often the creator will stand and point to text that is edited it into the video, ala ‘tops be like’, ‘bottoms feel like’, etc.. There is also tons of, “Do you like this boy? Do you like that boy? No. I’m gay. I’m a lesbian”. And the obligatory, “I love my girlfriend so much, this is my girlfriend, we’re getting married, she is the greatest girlfriend ever” content.

By the end of 2019, there is a drop in support from America for TikTok. “The company has faced child data privacy fines by the FTC and has been linked to several deaths in India; it has been accused of banning certain content, both politically sensitive and not.” (Jennings) Users who post or comment about an all too present racism (google Stephanie Freeman) are the typical targets for account removal. However, the accounts purporting racism are left alone. There is also the issue of data collection. Standard search history, content production, and even addresses are collected in a fashion similar to Facebook and Instagram; the difference being that the data goes to Chinese companies. The fear by the American government is that this information will be used in a potentially terroristic way. “Later that month, two senators from both political parties, Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Tom Cotton (R-AR), followed suit, calling for a ‘rigorous assessment’ of the potential national security risks of TikTok by US intelligence officials. Their memo expressed concern that it could be a target of foreign influence campaigns like those during the 2016 election, and noted that Chinese companies are required to adhere to Chinese law, which grants the government much greater access than the US to the data belonging to private companies.” (Jennings) Cut to 2020, and the U.S. is considering blocking TikTok from app markets.

A conclusion

We are living in a simulation. This sentence has been a popular irl retort by my quarter aged hipsters friends to literally any mention of the drudges of daily life. It always confused me. I thought it had something to do with singularity, like, in a William Gibson way, but after lightly reading some Nick Land, I was like, “Oh. Capitalism is technology, and we are in an inescapable matrix of conglomeracy that depletes human energy and fractalizes attention.” I know that’s enigmatic, but attention is really complicated and I’m not sure if I fully understand it. Land says I must have a fundamental and nuanced concept of time to really get it but I am far too busy being gay and shopping online to honestly deal with quantum physics, so…not holding my breath. Then I read some Matthew Crawford. He says what is being simulated during (and after) digital engagement is anxiety. Suddenly it all made sense. “We are living through a crisis of attention that is now widely remarked upon, usually in the context of some complaint or other about technology. As our mental lives become more fragmented, what is at stake often seems to be nothing less than the question of whether one can maintain a coherent self.” (Crawford) The memes, the lip syncing, the jokes, the politics, the ads, and dances are all adding to this attention anxiety, mimicking A.D.D.. For example, you are trying to read a HuffPo article and you are being bombarded by ads for celebrity nose jobs, you get an email notification, then a Facebook message, and at the bottom of the article (if you can get there) is a robust comment section filled with dissent and virtue signaling. The memories of all that interruption supersede an idealistically calmer daily life. The impact of micro video on attention is tremendous because it quickens the anxiety with loops of content information that make their way into the nervous simulation. Proof of the staying power of micro video is seen in the “Vine Challenge” trend on TikTok in which users are quizzed on their memory of Vines by audio clues.

Despite the negative connotation of anxiety, I think the contemporary attention economy makes good use of a more scattered or timely attention ability; transitioning and traversing to a possible calm and finally innovative enjoyment and entertainment. I am interested in more, invested in more. The idea of focusing on one thing at a time is now boring — “The horizon has exploded.” (Crawford). As I said before, the attention economy is complicated. The prospective variables are who is paying attention, what is being given attention, and how long that attention will last. The attention given to a piece of content or a task might be declining, but the attention paid to moving through those posts and tasks is increasing. Millions of posts on these platforms might get thrown away, but some live on in infamy. The latent anxiety that comes along with all this technology is certainly exacerbated by the inevitable reaching in by capitalism and I’m cool with that. I think disguised ads during regular digital excursion are possible to ignore and one can use this Atlas weight to pressurize interest and education. Or you could just turn your phone off. :]