84 - DOWNLOAD issue 178
The Sunken Titans
of Digit
Few industries witness sporadic success and extinction stories quite like the technology and media industries. From hegemony to history, Download examines two of the once unsinkable pillars of digital culture, their rise to power, and their ultimate demise.
By ALEX DAUD BRIGGS
You wouldn’t believe it today, but there was a time when the term ‘Nokia’ was synonymous with the mobile phone. The Finnish company was founded in 1865 as Pulp Mill, but come the 1970s they moved into the nascent mobile phone business and quickly conquered the industry. By the 2000s, as phones became more accessible to the public, Nokia struck gold with their 3310-model due to how affordable and accessible it was. Their phones popularized the basic design of the early bar cell phone with the screen on top and keypad on the bottom - and they were famously indestructible to boot. As demand grew, Nokia was able to rise with it; at their apex, they had a larger budget than Finland. Everything changed when the iPhone came out. The iPhone was itself kind of like a next-gen Nokia, not only allowing for calls and texts, but music, videos, games and so much more, far outclassing Nokia’s arsenal. Blindsided, they would try to compete with Apple for a few years in the smartphone industry to no avail. Nokia, which at its peak was worth £250 billion, was eventually sold to Microsoft in 2016 for just £350 million. That being said, Nokia is still around today, mostly dealing with mobile networks and licensing rather than phone hardware. It’s important to note that despite Apple’s success, the top two best-selling phone models of all time are still Nokia phones. They were a juggernaut of the millennium when digital technology was just infiltrating daily life. They may not be as big as they once were, but Nokia was one of the most important companies in modern history, and their contributions should not be forgotten.
introduction by: MIKE O’BRIEN design by: ELAINE TANG photography by: GAEL VAROQUAUX/ CC BY 2.0
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By SAHINA SHERCHAN Vine gave rise to many social media influencers and pop culture references still talked about today. Founded by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll, Vine was a video-sharing service with a catch: each video was six seconds long. After Vine launched as a free app on 24th January 2013, Twitter acquired it for for $30m, and the initial reception was promising. During the first few months of its release, it became the most downloaded free app, as viral videos propelled the service to mainstream fame. It was a titan of its time whose bitesized and easily shareable content was peerless. However, the ultimate cause of Vine’s fall was economical. As a six-second video platform, advertisers, who provide the majority of profit for free apps, saw little potential to engage. The incentive moved elsewhere for Vine’s major content creators like King Bach, David Dobrik, Lisa Koshy and Logan Paul, who saw better prospects in competing platforms like YouTube and Instagram. As its crowning talent scurried from the ship, Vine lost much of its user base. In retrospect, many apps were doing everything Vine offered but better. Instagram introduced 15-second videos in 2013, and YouTube allowed Vine compilations, on top of already enabling videos of any length. On 27th October 2016, Twitter announced Vine’s discontinuation. However, the meme culture that was popularised by Vine still lives on: in Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and (in the baby of the group) TikTok.
