Francis Garcia | Week 14: Vine Walked so TikTok Can Run
Photo/GIF Credit: Tenor
When I went to one of my senior friends during lunch today to get my change after buying a ticket to the school’s performing arts department’s spring musical Urinetown, I happened to run into another senior friend and yapped a bit about biting off people’s fingers as a means of setting personal boundaries whenever they put their hands too close to our face (delicious, am I right?). When I joked about biting them off whenever someone points above my head with their fingers put together and saying “boy” (which would have been spelled as “boi” in memes about this), my senior friend had this epiphany about how it has been SO long since they heard that word, which then easily transitioned into how we should have left that word in our times in the 2010s and (eventually) how we grew up with Vine, which then made way for Musical.ly and then transformed to TikTok and then allowed Xiaohongshu to run.
After having this conversation (and picking up my change after buying my opening night ticket to the town of pee and poop and farts and Febreeze), I was left with the question of how much our means of connecting with the rest of the world and sharing joy with others online has changed. Whatever happened to our humor? It felt like yesterday I was crashing out over how Arkansas is not pronounced as “are-can-zuz” like its almost twin sister Kansas and now I have to put up with skibidi toilet Ohio mega alpha rizzler behavior (icl ts pmo).
Allow me to take it back to the good old days of Vine, where a potato flew around the room of a kid who looks like a burnt chicken nugget while he watches Oprah hold up four fingers when she said she watched the film twice. I am pretty sure most of us have grew up watching Vines on our iPads or our parents’ phones when we were little. Silly little jokes made in five-seconds, who would have thought that the app that hosted these silly videos would one day be overshadowed by Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter and give rise of Musical.ly, an app made popular because of people lip-syncing to “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran while filming crazy transitions from their room to the beach to space. Cringey lip-sync clips would then rebrand themselves to TikTok, and it definitely did not lip-sync to Kesha when it created a new identity that flooded our youth starting from late elementary school up to this point.
Entertainment (especially humor) has evolved over the years to curate themselves to the interests of the people as they journey through various occasions, and social media apps like Vine and TikTok along with many other mediums of media and entertainment have jumped onto these things to keep themselves alive (well, maybe not Vine). If anything, trends and standards come and go, but joy and the spreading of it remains constant over the course of history, whether it is through drawing caricatures on the streets in the 18th century or subtly foreshadowing of incidents on TikTok today.
Hi Francis! Your blog this week was so entertaining, and I was laughing through a lot of it (especially the line about Urinetown). The way you mixed very vivid, nostalgic references–like the “burnt chicken nugget” Vine or Musical.ly lip syncs–with very hilarious commentary made your writing very engaging and insightful. I think you discussed a very interesting idea, and I often marvel about how our generation has basically grown up with every version of the internet’s personality shift, each one drastically different from the one that came before. Your mention of the “joy and spread of it remaining constant” despite these trends coming and going repeatedly was a very beautiful takeaway. Even though platforms change, trends cycle around, and memes evolve, the shared experiences of laughter are always there, and I think that’s extremely comforting in a weird way. Overall, your writing was very entertaining, and I look forward to your blogs in the future!
ReplyDeleteHi Francis! It was so nostalgic to hear you reference so many of older vines that had us laughing throughout our childhood. Vine is like a blast from the past and when you really delved into it, I myself began to think about our collective online humor has faced so many shifts, and how that has affected our generation as a whole. I really liked the concept you introduced of humor facing changes throughout our lives, but the need to make each other laugh not.
ReplyDeleteHi Francis!
ReplyDeleteI was immediately drawn to read your blog from the picture which I thought was quite random but after reading your blog and its title it became much more clear. I love how you included references to pop culture from many years ago when you referenced vine and many of its most iconic videos. But what I loved most about your blog was the introduction where you went step-by-step on the entire idea of why you chose to wrote this blog about this topic and I felt it helped the blog flow much better overall. I also like how you focused on topics which are popular with people our age so that your blog would not only resonate with a select few but most likely most to all of the readers in our cohort. Overall, I truly enjoyed reading your blog this week and I look forward to reading what you have to write next week!