Selma Roth

Saudi Gazette

 

Every once in a while, a new social media platform appears to transform the world. Think Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. The last time this happened was last year, when the video sharing service Vine launched its app for the iPhone, resulting in an avalanche of media coverage.



Perhaps it was the easiness of posting six-second videos, or because people were bored of the still life images of Instagram. In this vein, rather than just pictures of their meal or morning coffee they wanted brief videos of these same, trivial things. But more likely, it was Twitter’s backing of the service. Reportedly, the microblogging website bought Vine for a respectable US$30 million before it even had a phone app.



Whatever the reason, fact is that Vine, which now has an app for Android devices as well, has grown into something bigger than six-second breakfast shots. It has been used for short music and comedy performances, stop motion animation and even television advertisements. Numerous Vine sharing websites dig the app to collect users’ videos, grouping them by theme or popularity, or simply showing the latest uploaded Vine videos in what BBC called a “carousel of six-second slices of ordinary life.”



The Arab world could not stay behind with its own Vine aggregator, and currently arabvines.net and abvines.com are hugely popular with Saudi social media users. Arabs who post vine videos online – so-called Arab vines – usually mock their culture, habits, or how the rest of the world thinks about them without getting offensive.



One popular video titled, “You know you’re Arab when you hit something to make it work” shows a youngster hitting his laptop, table light, remote control, and modem, and in the end his own head during an exam to see if he can make it work.



Many vines also show how Arabs do something vs. how non- Arabs do something. A user called karimyscreamy has a video “Arabs vs. Americans at the Restroom”. He shows how Americans take a single sheet of toilet paper to wipe their rear, whereas Arabs take the entire roll in addition to a bottle of water.



Ironically, Instagram, acquired by Facebook in 2012, soon feared it would not be able to compete with Twitter’s Vine and its short six-second videos, thus it created a video feature six months after Vine had launched its iPhone app. The Instagram video feature allows its users to record videos for up to 15 seconds.



As a result, there are currently more “Vine” videos uploaded with Instagram. Critics of Vine say six seconds is simply too short to tell a story.



On the other hand, while Vine has significantly less users than Instagram, the latter is still predominantly used for sharing pictures, making Vine a better option if what you want to share is a video, according to some. The competition has gone so far that there is even a website to vote for Vine or Instagram. Vinevsinstagram.com asking visitors, “Which is best?”  Currently, Vine seems to be on the winning hand.



But before declaring a winner, the two competitors may end up attracting different audiences, while others will use both apps for their Arab-mocking videos, as can be seen on the most popular Arab Vine aggregator websites.