Hello again everyone! New year, new blog, new identity, right? Did anyone make resolutions? I don’t usually, but I made one for this year, and granted it’s a bit precious and seemingly simple: I resolved to never go near the application Vine ever again. This sounds simplistic and a bit lame, but I am sure now that Vine is going to set society (the society privileged enough to have access to Vine, that is) back at least a couple decades.

Vine, that hip 6-second video app, has been around for less than 2 years but has already proved itself a relevant medium for social interaction, hierarchy and popular culture tastes: just today my friend referenced a Vine satirizing Beyoncé Knowles new song “Drunk in Love.” Many young celebrities popular on Twitter and Instagram have also taken up “Vining” their day to day lives, or, as my Art Studies class has come to understand it, archiving.

Vine is an archive! Vine is an enormous collection of personal videos, comedy shorts, visual stimulation, the list goes on. I myself had a Vine in early 2012, before the application had any real clout in the social media world. The only way to find a video was through the user’s profile or organizational tags. In short, everyone’s video archive was their own to construct and share with the world. But within the year vine added the ability to add others’ video to one’s profile, and so the popularity contests began. Almost all of the most well-known and followed Vine users are amateur comedians, and their humor has shaped the way new users seek popularity. Where this becomes problematic is the way certain archives compromise, or to borrow a term from Rodney G.S. Carter, “silence” the voices and contributions of others.

The two most popular Viners are both male, the first being KingBach, the second Nash Grier. Both have well over a million followers, and have considerable clout on other platforms (both have Youtube channels and twitters, link attached). Their humor now plays to an audience of millions. But what are they saying? What is it about their videos that stick, that get circulated around the world and on a large scale, the most valuable “fonds” in the archive of Vine as a whole. These collections reflect how we as a society decide and define the ‘funny,” the “popular,” the “now.”

The thing is, a lot of these famous people have really awful senses of humor. KingBach’s videos constantly utilize racist and sexist tropes, especially when it comes to objectifying women and featuring racist caricatures of minorities. Nash Grier recently migrated to Youtube, and one of his first videos was focused on his personal and generalized expectations for girls when wishing to gain the attention and approval of boys and men.

They are both utterly nauseating and indefinitely powerful.

Within the world of Vine, which has been gaining ground in the social media sphere for more than a year now, these are elite and respected comedians. Their self-editing and refinement (what they intend to show and not show of themselves to the public) is accepted as an example for what Vine represents to its entire community. These are the voices dictating others, shaping the culture of Vine humor and taste. When these kinds of opinions become a standard, what is preventing other forms of entertainment from being seen and heard. The trivialization of social issues not only inhibits their progress, it now cops cultural identity as commodity, as a joke, as something to be examined not for its judicial values, but for what is going to be a hit.

So, I really dislike Vine. Its original intent has been totally skewed and it no longer serves as an individual archive, but a reflection of the hybridity of personal and social taste. This would not be such an issue if social taste, at least as far as Vine was concerned, was not dictated by misogyny and racial elitism. If you don’t make any of those jokes in person, there’s no reason they should find an audience on the internet.