I'm thinking of making a series of little essays and rants about various topics on here. I just have fun making shitposts in a serious format.
Vines hold a distinct, but not necessarily unique position in history. They created their own quickly evolving system of communication, and depending on your outlook, either broke comedy down to the basics in an intuitive, ultimately memorable way, or desecrated the very concept of a joke. Regardless of whether for better or worse, Vines, like the sonnet and the Dadaist before them, had a cultural impact that, while niche, is profound in today's students.
Anyone can note the impact they've had on local classrooms. From the classic "Ms.Keisha" reference made almost any time someone seems to be asleep, to the more difficult to understand references that are made up of gestures or sounds, it's not uncommon for students to discuss, reminisce about, or recite vines.
One of the most interesting Vine parallels is to that of Samurai and Heian Japanese culture. The Heian period, named for the prototype of Kyoto where the capital had recently been moved to, was intensely focused on the arts, particularly on poetry and calligraphy. Japanese poetry overall has an emphasis on simple language, nature themes, and the format in which it is presented- if written, it must be in beautiful handwriting, and if spoken, it has to be written in such a way that it can be easily read and understood by listeners. At the same time, samurai were expected to be literate, and to have some familiarity with poetry. Indeed, in the ritualistic honor suicide seppuku performed by disgraced samurai, it's common for the warrior to sit down and compose a poem before killing himself (oh big mood).
Vines are a structured art form, with only seven seconds to express what maybe an entire story in some cases, and the senses of fatalism and simplicity present in Japanese poetry are very prevalent. There are endless examples of vines that incorporate themes of death or impermanence, but for one example, take a simple comedic vine wherein one young man attempts to putt during mini golf, misses, and promptly throws himself into a nearby lake. Without word, he expresses the same disgrace as some Samurai.
However, it is impossible not to acknowledge the differences. In vines, honor is not a recurring theme, and the overwhelming majority of them are comedic, where many Heian and Samurai poems are deadly serious or romantic. While the formatting is similar, the root of the vine isn't truly captured until you look at two other key factors: the comedic value and the framing.
The sense of humor in vines can be traced back to the Dada movement all across Europe after WWI, when anti-nationalist, anti-bourgeoisie, and anti-establishment artists created nihilistic pieces. An easy example of parallels between vine and Dada is the piece "LHOOQ"- a postcard of the Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee drawn on her. If you pronounce the title in French, it sounds like "Elle a chaud au cul" (She has a hot ass). Compare to the "Spell ICUP" phenomenon.
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Dadaism also incorporated themes of chance, and anyone versed in Vine knows that all of the best content comes from chance. The role of the cameraman, the artist, is often not to plan out a story and execute it but to capture the perfect moment on film. There are also historical similarities between the periods. Nationalism has been on the rise recently, and while modern culture sometimes fails to consciously react to it, much of the nihilistic, conceptually challenging content that came out of Vine may be related to the sense of defeat among the younger generations.
Finally, the framing. There are certain traditions among the best Vines that simply can't be ignored. Many of them choose to end the video just slightly before the average person would. This creates the illusion of being cut off, being taken out of context. Considering the absurd content of many of these pieces, it makes sense to accentuate that by leaving the viewer without any proper reaction to what's going on presented by the narrative. There are also certain editing styles that you'll find very often. Meme culture and Vines often intersect, either via Vines transitioning into memes after the death of the original format, or through memes interacting with Vines, mostly through editing and audio insertion. I'll go off on memes sometimes, because they parallel the surrealist art movement that started directly after Dada.
Vine may have been a twinkle among the stars, dead far too early, but it still managed to form its own loose standards and represent a larger arc of nihilistic chance art, simplicity, and fatalism. While some of the references may eventually run stale, or some may believe that they simply aren't worth anyone's time, there's a generation, a community formed through mutual respect and admiration of a structured sub-genre of absurd comedy.
