Vine Users' First Posts Are a Fascinating Peek at Our Collective Social Media Confusion

Prior to joining Vine, I couldn’t understand the six second constraint, just like prior to joining Twitter, I couldn’t grasp the significance of 140 characters.

I get it now. Arbitrary as they may be, the limitations on each medium force a user to be more cognizant of what each character and each second is worth. The results of this awareness can be beautiful, haunting, hilarious, or just plain bizarre (see Will Sasso’s lemon schtick for the latter). But whatever category they fall into, well-done Vines are captivating.

When you first join Vine though, you aren’t used to the idea of a second being so powerful and you certainly don’t know how to make six of them matter. First Vines are invariably unimpressive and boring. Or so you might think.

I spent yesterday morning bathing in the banality of the #firstpost recesses of Vine. It wasn't on purpose: while exploring a friend’s early forays into video glory, I accidentally clicked on the #firstpost hashtag, and suddenly found myself in a very unusual virtual place, characterized less by attempts to garner views and more by a cavalcade of semi-private, unremarkable moments.

My interest was piqued. It’s like looking at the flip side of viral phenomena, the not-so-seedy and rather banal underbelly of social media. And yet, it’s for precisely that reason that these first videos are compelling. Well, at least some of them anyway.

There are cute animals (of course there are cute animals. It is the Internet, after all).

There are nights out singing karaoke to what sounds like "Gangnam Style," but I can't be sure.

There are weird lights and buzzing noises.

There are also typical "what's in my room" videos, sometimes including dinosaurs.

The utter lack of effort provides a series of raw glimpses into what we often gloss over on the web in search of becoming viral or getting hits. It’s real life filtering its way onto an otherwise bombastic Internet and it can be just as beautiful, haunting, hilarious, or bizarre as the rehearsed videos that become popular.

I’m admittedly getting a little too philosophical about this, but these #firstpost Vines might say more about us as Internet users and everyday people than the more polished video products. Why? Because these are the videos we upload when we aren’t really sure what we’re doing.

All that being said, it's still definitely more fun to watch Will Sasso though.