Filling in the gaps (on Vine)
A man in 1953 sits in the corner of a dim bedroom in Wisconsin. He flips the pages of an old photo album, its pages stained by age and use. The plastic sheeting hangs loose on most pages and lets out a shrill crinkling at every page turn. The man finds pictures of his long deceased wife from 1914. She’s standing on a beach in Milwaukee, the start of her first pregnancy just visible through a polka dot one piece. She’s smiling for the camera. Her head is turned to the side in the next few photos. She’s staring out at a skyline she’s seeing for the first time. He remembers how the smoke bellowed up from behind the biggest building they’d ever seen. They would spend that entire afternoon wandering the city’s streets trying to find a deli and not caring if they got lost.
The man’s granddaughter sits in the corner of a dim bedroom in Wisconsin in 2020. She flips through a photo album her son loaded onto a tablet he gifted her for Christmas years ago. The lighting of the room fluctuates with every swipe. She finds the series of images she was looking for. Her husband, now gone after a short battle with cancer, looks out from the screen. He’s old but still healthy. He was still splitting wood in the back yard. His eyes move to the side and she sees their precious grandson appear in the frame. Her husband looks back to her, light blue eyes gleaning, and the edges of his mouth curl upwards into the smile she fell in love with when they were 19 and worried about everything and nothing. A joyful tear escapes his eye and rolls down his cheek and her face mirrors his in that dark bedroom. Then the image starts again, six seconds passed.
Twitter launched Vine, a 6 second gif sharing service, a week ago. In the last week it’s been deemed a pointless iteration of existing technology and heralded as a revolutionary step in sharing. It is an iteration. The gif certainly isn’t a new. And the gif is a bastard son of video. And it’s also revolutionary. It’s revolutionary in the same way Twitter was. Twitter set a limit on the length of a written message, but what they really did was create an entirely new medium by placing concrete boundaries on an existing one. Like Twitter, Vine gives users a prompt and that prompt is brevity. Vine says, here’s 6 seconds. What can you capture?
What you can capture is the movements of emotion. You can capture the full motion of a smile and the eye widening of surprise. Video can capture these things too, of course, but video is the 50 page research paper to Vine’s abstract. People willingly consume and share and save six second memories. Vine is important despite it’s iterative features because people will actually use it.
