One more reason to be glad I’m an Old, because thank goddess there was no internet to record all the stupid stuff we did when we were young and very, very stupid:
… On a bright afternoon in her sparse Miami Beach apartment, [Jessi] Smiles thumbs through some recent videos on her iPhone. She’s 20, tall, curvy, pretty and blond, dressed in black leggings and a blue blouse. She just finished applying makeup, and positioning a stool by a camera, so the light is just right. Her older brother Joey is collecting money for a beer-and-pizza run before she shoots a new video, which she’ll shortly post to her 3 million followers. It’s one of the three or four she films each week. “When people say I’m a ‘celebrity’ or anything like that, I hate that,” she tells me, in her slight Cuban-American accent. “I just think I’m well-known on the Internet.”
Smiles is famous on Vine, the latest “It” app in the constantly changing landscape of social media. Launched in January 2013 after being purchased by Twitter for a reported $30 million, Vine lets people record and share microsize video loops, six seconds or shorter. “Your grandmother’s on YouTube – it’s not cool,” says Marcus Johns, a precocious, good-looking 20-year-old with more than 4 million followers on the app. “Vine is the thing now. Kids in our ADD generation want to express an idea and move on to the next thing.”…
Less than a year ago, she was a cashier at a day spa, going by her real name, Jessica Vazquez. Now she’s topping her old annual salary each month (though she doesn’t disclose the figure, her many sponsors, such as Wendy’s, pay around $3,000 for a mention in a single clip). “My whole life has done, like, 20 somersaults,” she says. “It happened very fast. When you’re on Vine, you become a brand. Everyone is a brand. I’m a brand, and there’s nothing you can do about that.”
She sounds jaded for a reason, as is clear when her ever-present mom and manager, or “momager,” as Cristina Ferrero calls herself, shows Smiles a couple of newly posted Vines….
The guy in the photo is Curtis Lepore, a top 10 Viner, and Smiles’ ex-boyfriend. Last summer, they became Vine’s first reality stars, courting each other so publicly it was hard to believe it wasn’t staged. As their online romance unfolded in daily updates, it became the biggest story Vine had ever seen, spawning countless hashtags, video tributes and talk of a reality show. When the couple Vined their plans to meet in New York, some 2,000 screaming fans mobbed Washington Square Park to watch their first kiss. But the fairy-tale romance quickly became a nightmare. A few weeks after their high-profile meet-up, Smiles pressed charges against Lepore for allegedly raping her…
“I am not a rapist,” Curtis Lepore tells me over pizza in North Hollywood, two weeks after I visited Smiles. Dressed in jeans and a black hoodie with the words POPULAR DEMAND across his chest, and tattoos poking out from under his sleeves, the 30-year-old barely makes eye contact as he says these words. Compared to the chipper, blue-eyed pop-punk persona he projects online, he seems bitter and depressed. Even his trusty sidekick Buster Beans, the Roomba-riding Boston terrier and most popular dog on Vine, seems to notice, as he yaps for his master’s attention. “OK,” Lepore says as he relents and picks Buster up. “I’ll hold you in my lap like a baby.”…
BruceFromOhio
Which means that shortly Vine will be so passe … and us olds will be able to rip these poor stoopid kids off endlessly with retreads, remakes, and leftovers.
James E. Powell
@BruceFromOhio:
We True Oldsters™ will continue to insist that we don’t know anything about any of the things the kids are doing these days.
Steeplejack
Based on this trajectory, I may live just long enough to witness Generation Z-Beta revive monotasking and writing in longhand with quill pens.
Higgs Boson's Mate
Hmm, three grand to mention a sponsor in a six second video. Does anyone else suspect that social media is beginning to look a lot like the next bubble?
polyorchnid octopunch
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: I dunno… if she’s delivering the eyballs, not really. How much tv time and audience does three grand get you?
Roger Moore
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
It started looking like a bubble years ago. Now it’s obviously a bubble.
scav
Amateurs. Their failure to manage, monetize and leverage this next inevitable stage of their pseudo sexual tension arc is revealing. I think I’d rather watch everyone playing with Stickers on Line. No real reason. The Bear and Bunny remind me of Beanie Babies no doubt. Chose your bubble, agreed.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@James E. Powell:
As a technically literate person who has been around since BBS days and kept up his modest skills I can state with a modicum of assurance that I know some of what the kids are up to these days. As an Old (66) I can state with complete assurance that I find some of it very silly.
Omnes Omnibus
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: And they think some of the things you do are silly. And so it has been for generations.
scav
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: The pages and pages of ascii cow art were epic and transformational, to be sure.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@scav:
Heh! I remember a co-worker showing me his ascii masterpiece; Abraham Lincoln done entirely in punctuation marks. “Why,” I asked, “did you do this?” “Because it’s really cool,” he answered. I just nodded and turned back to my terminal. Yes, it was that long ago.
scav
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: Terminal even — green or amber?
Higgs Boson's Mate
@scav:
I believe that it was white text on a black background. Although I may be confusing it with vi or Emacs or any of too many command lines.
BruceFromOhio
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: Real programmers and sysadmins use vi. Emacs is for pussies.
The DEC VAX used the amber tubes. Green was all IBM, all the time. In my oh-so-limited time there, the white text on black screen came along with the PC-based terminal emulators.
Bet you won’t see any of this stuff on Vine.
@scav: WERECOW!
Roger Moore
@BruceFromOhio:
Them’s fightin’ words.
Omnes Omnibus
@Roger Moore: I have no clue what the fuck you guys are talking about. So there.
Roger Moore
@Omnes Omnibus:
Is that a request for information or a humble brag?
Omnes Omnibus
@Roger Moore: Neither. A simple statement of fact.
Nutella
@BruceFromOhio:
Amber? Only after the second generation of VT-220s came out. Earlier 220s and VT-100s were white on black.
NotMax
Yeah, that whole thinking thing is just so 20th century. And it’s ha-a-ard.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@NotMax:
All right Professor Einstein, that Relativity thing sounds very cool. Now just sum it up in six seconds and you’ll be fine.
scav
my terminals were a mixed bag, but I think mostly . . . . green? But I know there should have been some heavy VAX time too. I just was so oblivious to remembering hardware at the time. Earliest b&w screen that I remember was the first vertical screen I ever saw, I’m pretty sure it was an Alto. That was so unexpected it stuck.
Joel Hanes
@Nutella:
Earlier 220s and VT-100s were white on black
Yes. And so were the first Lear-Siegler ADM-3As I saw (VAX terminals). But I think they and the later excellent Wyse ASCII terminals came an all three colors: amber, white, and green. The enormous cubical PLATO terminals connected to UIUC used IIRC distinctive orange plasma displays.
OTOH, the Tektronix 4012 stroke-graphics terminals were brilliant, saturated-oscilloscope green, and printed b/w on photopaper.
jayjaybear
The whole thing sounds like a Portlandia skit.
scav
@Joel Hanes: VT-100! thank you — a name rescued from the vasty deep! I’m recognizing several of those!
JGabriel
I started to read the linked article on Vine, but got bored with it about a page and a half through.
Which, to be fair, is still 84 seconds longer than the attention span of the average Vine user.
JGabriel
@BruceFromOhio:
Really, by the time anything shows up in Rolling Stone it’s already passe. And that was no less true in 1985 than it is today, so I think we can probably skip blaming the Internet for that one.
Bjacques
Jennicam.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Bjacques: Questiongirl was my favorite. Scientists are sexy.
Xantar
@BruceFromOhio:
xkcd has got you beat: http://xkcd.com/378/
keestadoll
“When you’re on Vine, you become a brand. Everyone is a brand. I’m a brand, and there’s nothing you can do about that.”
Codger-Alert: Yes you actually can do something about that: don’t Vine and get an actual real-time life.
libarbarian
That piece is a good exploration of the self-justification of a rapist.
“Maybe I raped her but I’m no rapist”.
kc
I was a happier person before I read these things.
Paul in KY
Read that article in Rolling Stone. We live in some strange times…
eldorado
@Comrade Scrutinizer: Questiongirl was my favorite. Scientists are sexy.
and now i know what i’m going to be hunting for in my discarded hard drive pile when i get home
lol
@libarbarian:
What has the world come to when feminazi prudes consider having sex with an unconscious concussion victim without her consent rape? Besides, she had sex with him before and just after she met him so clearly she’s a slutty slut slut who deserved it anyways.
boatboy_srq
@BruceFromOhio: Already passé – there’s a print media article about it.
EthylEster
I don’t get it and I don’t want to get it.
libarbarian
@lol:
Totally. There’s two sides to every story. Her side is that he had sex with her while she was unconscious. His side is .that he totally already had sex with her already and that it’s like totally reasonable to stick it in a possibly-concussed girl who is fast asleep so it can’t be rape because he didn’t think she’d mind.
hells littlest angel
It’s amazing how many new and different ways in which the world can be fucking ridiculous.