BRAVE NEW SOCIAL MEDIA
Is Facebook old-fashioned? Duh! Of course it is, because now all the cool kids are parents, and having your parents checking up on you on Facebook is, like, the uncoolist thing EVAR.
Ok, sorry, that’s the chocolate-filled coffee I just drank talking. It speaks in a sticky-sweet voice and I can’t stop listening.
But seriously, Facebook has actually never been cool, though it can be a useful tool at times. Recently I was turned on to Vine by the work of Thomas Sanders, who makes (mostly) funny six-second videos with an amazing amount of creativity. I’d heard of Vine before, but at that point I just scoffed in the fashion of an elderly white gentleman sipping tea in a puffy armchair while grumbling about “the masses.” Now, years later, I can see the error of my presumption, because Vines can be pretty damn neat. The work of Sanders was a gateway to many other users of the service, and I am now a fan, basically because I like the idea of making a video almost instantly after I come up with the idea to make a video. I suspect this might be a consequence of having spent ten years making a single feature film; I want these things DONE. NOW. And they are. I still suck at making Vines of my own, but it doesn’t matter; I’ll never be one of the A-list there, which is fine because I don’t need that kind of pressure (he said nonchalantly while secretly entertaining fantasies of attending huge Vine Meetups in NYC and LA and hanging out with Egyptian DJs who raise rabbits and wear their hats backwards).
Another social media service I was turned on to via Vine is Snapchat (For some reason I keep typing Snapshat, which I assume is a completely different service). I’d also heard of Snapchat before, which I’d also dismissed in a similarly raised-pinkie fashion, but again, I think there’s something to it. The photos/chats/videos disappear after a certain number of viewings/amount of time. What’s the good of that? You ask. To me, it’s an attempt to regain the feeling of real-world interaction, a backlash against endlessly permanent interactions whose nature is changed because considerations of their permanence. With Snapchat, whatever you say is over and unrecorded (but possibly screenshot, alas) once it’s out you pretty little mouth. People feel less inhibited, say more of whatever nonsense they really think, and it’s over and out; you’re free to move on afterwards because there are fewer consequences. In my case, there are literally no consequences because exactly zero people have ever seen anything I’ve posted on Snapchat. I assume this is because you really need to become well-known on another service like Instagram (which I have reluctantly rejoined, though I’m not terribly active) or Vine before you can entice people over to Snapchat to revel in your fabulous everyday life, real-time, instead of talking with the person sitting next to them on the subway. The nice thing about this is that I can spout any damn nonsense that comes into my fatuous head, something I do anyway, but now I can record myself doing it! There’s no possible use for it that I can imagine.
And now, of course, we have Periscope, launched today by Twitter, which lets everyone broadcast everything all the time. AKA Chaos, mass hysteria, pet co-habitation, etc.
Cool.
Anyway, these things come and go, as those of us who have reached our 40s more or less intact can attest, and I’m sure something new and more interesting will replace the New Things. It keeps things fresh, or at least a welcome distraction from…uh…China’s political hegemony? Tupperware? Eerily anthropomorphic depictions of Elmer the Bull? Voles in general? I can’t remember.