This year, comedy and entertainment have taken on a new form, a 6-second form, to be exact. Vine is a smart phone application owned by Twitter that debuted back in January as one of the many video clip shooting and sharing applications available online. Setting itself apart from other applications of practically the same function like Instagram and Keek, Vine was the most-downloaded free application on the iOS store in April and had 11% of iPhone users as active users by May (Souppouris, 2013). Vine was then released for Android in June, further increasing its user-base as well as its fan-base through the publicity of the “Best Vines” communities on Facebook and compilation videos on Youtube. Why have a “Best Vines” public community when other applications have nothing of the sort? As “young” as it is, Vine has already created (perhaps intentionally or unintentionally) an image for itself as an application for short and comedic video clips, as opposed to Keek, which caters more to simple video bloggers, and Instagram, which is more for sharing clips and photos for aesthetic viewing pleasure. Similar to Twitter that has a 140character limit for posts, Vine’s 6-second limit is said to spawn creativity given the time constraint and the desire for one’s post to be noticed in the massive sea of social media and as Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” The application’s features, publicity and fastgrowing fan-base (not necessarily user-base) helped Vine users to do just that. Facebook’s Best Vines page, where popular and clever posts are compiled and publicly viewable, has more than 1.4 million fans, while its recent 2013 compilation has close to 2 million views. The more popular users have follower bases well into the hundreds of thousands (and in some cases more than a million) (Holt, 2013). All of this has come to form the different views of social media users. There are those who are Vine users (popular or not), who are constantly under an unspoken pressure to spend a lot of time and effort into creating perfect and funny

clips to gain likes and followers. There are also those who don’t have a Vine account but enjoy watching the many clips posted on the Best Vines page, and even those who neither have an account nor spend a lot of time watching clips but know of the reputation of the videos posted on Vine. The comedic aspect of Vine videos has proved to be the key to its skyrocketing success. Comedy has taken many forms all throughout history, beginning with the comedic ironies and parodies in theatre in ancient Greece. According to Aristotle, these performances were considered to be cathartic and a form of purification from the tragedy-like emotions in their society through the depiction of the harmless mistakes of “inferior people.” Barthes states the retention of the presence of this kind of purification in today’s day and age, only in different forms (such as the striptease, as mentioned in his essay). Today, “in comedy, timing is everything. It’s all about the anticipation and delivery, playing off of expectation and striking when the moment’s right (Holt, 2013).” People today constantly seek a form of escape from the hustle and bustle of this society of many demands and pressures. However, in a fast-developing technological society, people have also become obsessed with time conservation, convenience and the compression of information. Vine videos are now one of these forms, being easily accessible and bite-sized, that its audience can enjoy the comedic relief while still under the illusion that their time is being distributed efficiently by watching only short clips. The birth of all of these fanatics (users and non-users) is an interesting way to study present human psychology in different ways. Social media, as a whole, has driven people to seek attention through all kinds of forms, as if everyone is attempting to catch their “big break” at attaining some sort of social status. Max Burlingame, a popular Vine user with over

185,000 followers that has gotten exposure on Saturday Night Live, states that making Vines is a lot of “problem solving” in the sense that a lot of thought goes into condensing all that you want to show given the time constraint in order to achieve the maximum effect. "I count the syllables in every line and try to rephrase the line to be more compressed but with the same amount of comedy. It's an awful process, if I don't initially laugh at a vine when I'm done recording it, I delete it right away, then do a retake and realized that I actually did like the one before. At that point I'm screwed,” he said. Burlingame is one of many users who spend a lot of time in building their own humor’s reputation on Vine and all over the internet. Even businesses are using Vine’s exposure and publicity to their advantage in order to promote their products and services in a creative manner. A lot of implications about people and society can be inferred from the overall reception, success and fandom of Vine. One can be that Vine is not only yet another social media sharing application but also yet another outlet and medium for those in search of attention by devoting an excess amount of time and effort into perfecting the 6-second clip. It evokes a certain irony under the illusion of Vine being more time conserving (in terms of time spent on leisure) and offering features to make shooting more convenient for its users. However, that is only considering the users of Vine, but not its overall audience and fans, which made it successful in the first place. Even with the convenience of having smart phones, tablets and iPads and having easy access to the internet, people’s attention spans have become shorter and have lost the ability to receive and process the same kind of information for a long amount of time. Precisely why, for example, the scope covered by someone watching Vines for an hour (which would approximately be around 600) would be larger than that of someone reading a newspaper article for an hour. Vine’s success, then, was to due to

its combining of comedy, which serves as a cathartic form of leisure amidst stress, and brevity, which caters to people’s short attention spans, mode of decoding information nowadays and obsession with convenience and time conservation.

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Bibliography Barthes, Roland, and Annette Lavers. "Striptease." Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. N. pag. Print. Dave, Paresh. "Video App Vine's Popularity Is Spreading, Six Seconds at a Time." Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 20 June 2013. Web. 08 Oct. 2013. . Holt, Kris. "Vine and the Art of 6-second Comedy." The Daily Dot. N.p., 05 July 2013. Web. 08 Oct. 2013. . Masahiro, Kitano. "Aristotle's Theory of Comedy." Bulletin of Gunma Prefectural Women's University, 2001. Web. 08 Oct. 2013. . Souppouris, Aaron. "The Verge." The Verge. N.p., 09 Apr. 2013. Web. 08 Oct. 2013. . "Vine (software)." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 10 July 2013. Web. 08 Oct. 2013. .