saturDaY 29•10•2016
PeoPle, life, etc...
6
THE MORUNG EXPRESS
Whither Vine? Ending a vibrant web community Robinson Meyer The Atlantic
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witter is shutting down Vine, the mirthful, hilarious, and often bizarre social network composed solely of six-second looping videos. In the next few months, the company will stop supporting the Vine mobile app, the primary venue of Vine production and consumption. Facing a stubborn lack of profits and a seemingly unending crisis of confidence, Twitter has chosen to shutter its weirdest and most distinctive product. In a post on Medium, Vine promises that its videos will stay online after the shut-down. “We’ll be keeping the website online because we think it’s important to still be able to watch all the incredible Vines that have been made,” says the release. “Thank you. To all the creators out there —thank you for taking a chance on this app back in the day. To the many team members over the years who made this what it was — thank you for your contributions. And of course, thank you to all of those who came to watch and laugh every day,” it continues. And how many people came. While Vine’s growth had slowed in the past year and a half, it was once one of the most vibrant and creative factories of culture on the internet. From 2012 to 2015, there was simply nowhere online like Vine. You could get lost in Vine like it was Wikipedia, and you could laugh on Vine like it was YouTube. It welded the old internet’s spontaneity and
“randomness” to the new social web’s scale and diversity. As the web continues to expand and corporatize, as more companies merge an Apple-like aesthetic with Walmart-like scale, it’s hard to imagine anything like Vine happening again. Few of the core features we think of as “Twitter” were invented by people employed by Twitter. None of the founders invented the 140-character message, the constraint that gives the service its verve; instead, they adopted it as a technical aspect of SMS texting. Nor did anyone at Twitter invent the @-reply. Not the hashtag or the retweet, either—all were first created by users, then borrowed by the company as an official feature.
The company didn’t quite invent the six-second looping video. It bought the startup that did—Vine—in October 2012, right before it was to launch. But it can get credit for introducing the world to a form unlike any other online: Vines were too weird a thing for users to generate themselves. When Vine debuted early in 2013, Twitter boasted that its brief videos were the visual equivalent of a tweet. How the student excelled the master. Twitter is where you joke about sports and whine about politics. It is always wordy—and thus inescapably political. Vine? Vine is art. Joyful, astonishing, frenetically blissful art. Like the 14-line sonnet or the 12-bar blues, the sixsecond loop accepted its
defining constraint and therefore transcended it. Those six seconds could show you anything—a tiny Japanese owl, two teenagers joking in Tulsa, a water bubble on the International Space Station—but they were always six seconds. The curtain always slammed down, and you were always sent back to the beginning again. This made every Vine an experiment in form. Some had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Some rebelled against any clear point: They started by showing you something crazy and the craziness persisted right through to the end. And the best ran along next to you as you tried to figure out what was happening: You began watching, you thought you saw the joke, then the premise of the whole Vine
would shift to reveal a new joke, and then—wham— you were back where you began. This weird formalism is one reason why Vine—the social network—could have only happened when it did. Only the flood of venture capital that followed from Facebook’s mass popularity, only the lack of good investment options after the global financial crisis, only the hundreds of investors looking to spot the next Google, could have produced a little app as strange as Vine. (Think about it: For a time, a whole planetary class of bankers and hedge-fund managers invested their money not in better ways to mine a rock or ship a box across the ocean, but in inventing new tools of expression. How worldhistorically weird.) And only a generation of teens and young adults newly empowered with smartphones—a wacko device with a web connection, a video camera, and a link to the whole staggering breadth of global pop culture—could have produced Vine, a medium that requires a willingness to show off to friends and strangers, a freedom to look a little silly or stupid, and hours and hours of waiting-around time to workshop ideas. No wonder then that, for many teens and some adults too, Vines became a factory of mass culture, an ever-churning storehouse of allusion and one-liners and humor and dance moves. What SNL or MTV or Anchorman or Chapelle’s Show or Gilmore Girls were for older generations, Vine was for a
Failed at dieting? May be you are not wired for it
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IANS
ave you ever wondered why some people just cannot stick to a planned diet while others face no such issues? They may just not be wired for that, suggests a new study that found a link between ability to self-regulate a healthy body weight and individual brain structure. Dieting success may be easier for some people because they have an improved white matter mechanism connecting the ex-
ecutive control and reward systems in their brain, the study, published in the journal Cognitive Neuroscience, said. The research involved a group of thirty six chronic dieters, with mean body fat of 29.6%. Pin-Hao Andy Chen from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, US and colleagues asked them to make simple judgements on images in order to divert their attention from the real aim of the task. The activity carried out was
a food cue reactivity task designed to localise the executive control and reward areas in the brain, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). After localising the executive control and reward areas, the researchers used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to identify the white matter track connecting these areas in order to quantify the integrity within this tract. The functional MRI results demonstrated that dieters showed greater reactivity to
food images than control images. The DTI results further showed that those with lower body fat percentages showed greater white matter integrity between executive control and reward areas of the brain. “Individuals with reduced integrity may have difficulty in overriding rewarding temptations, leading to a greater chance of becoming obese than those with higher structural integrity,” the researchers said.
How to spend more time, less money during vacations!
Travel at less popular times as the price of flights varies considerably depending on the month, day and time of travel
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ant to spend quality time with your family on a vacation, but by not causing a hole in your pocket? Travel at less popular times as the price of flights varies considerably depending on the month, day and time of travel and try a private room instead of a hotel, experts say. In 2015, 49 percent of travellers planning getaways for Dusshera and Diwali favoured international destinations over domestic breaks. Experts from Skyscanner.com, travel search company, have shared secrets to make holiday getaways in 2016 lighter on the pockets of Indian travellers. Travel at less popular times: The price of flights varies considerably depending on the month, day and even time of travel. Avoiding the weekends can make a huge impact on the price. Fly indirect: In case there is more time but less money, try flights with a stop-over. Indirect routes to the main destination will cost much less and will even give one the
time to explore more than one destination; thus making the most with the least. Mix and match your flights: Using a combination of airlines can also prove to be an effective cost saving strategy. Different airlines charge differently on similar routes. Mix and match the airlines to find the best price combination to suit the pocket. Fly from an alternative airport: Even though there may be an airport at the doorstep, don’t rule out the possibility that it may be cheaper to fly from one slightly further away. It may work out cheaper, even with the cost of a train or bus ticket to reach the alternative airport. Bring your own food on board: Many low-cost airlines charge for food on board and it is often extremely pricey. Save yourself a small fortune by taking along snacks instead of buying them on the plane or in the airport. Beat the baggage fees: If you’re worried about excess baggage charges, why not
wear your extra items instead of cramming them into your case? There are some fantastic products on the market that let you take additional belongings on your person ensuring they won’t count as excess baggage. Weigh your luggage before you leave home: Some of us get to the airport to find we’re over our baggage limit and end up paying inflated charges. Avoid this by weighing your bag before you leave home and take out any unnecessary items if you find you’re over the limit. Try a private room instead of a hotel: Over the last few years there’s been an explosion in websites that allow locals to rent out their sofas, spare rooms, whole apartments and even gardens! Sites like AirBnB have transformed accommodation options, and for travellers, the experience can be far more rewarding than a stay in a chain hotel, as well as being cheaper. Eat like a local: Not only is tasting new cuisine part of the joy of travelling but you’re likely to eat far better as well as saving money, when you eat like a local. From $1 bowls of noodles in Vietnam to backstreet French bistros, produce is usually locally sourced and tastier, rather than imported. Save on foreign currency exchange: Withdrawing money abroad can cost a lot in charges. Although using a debit card can be cheaper than a credit card, be aware that most banks will charge for each cash withdrawal on top of a commission fee. Best practice is to take out larger sums so you’re charged less frequently, only take care and don’t keep all your money in the same place. Getting your currency before you arrive at the airport is also a way of securing the best rate you can and works out a lot cheaper. (Source: IANS)
younger class of kids. And doesn’t that make sense? After all, the atomic unit of teen culture is the movie quote—“tis but a flesh wound” or “if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball”—and a Vine was often nothing more than a free-floating movieless quote, attached to a comment thread and indexed by URL. Take “back at it again at the Krispy Kreme,” above. That Vine is an instantly memorable quote—but it’s also a complete story, almost. We meet a character. We see him do something crazy. And then (another formal twist) the climax isn’t even in the Vine. We’re left to imagine the sign shattering and the stunned Krispy Kreme Kustomers, and meanwhile the Vine has spun forward to set up his jump again. Without the smartphone, this is a ridiculous accident; with the smartphone, he’s a hero. Only a Vine this good could prompt a many-thousands word article at New York magazine about what actually happened at that mall in Matthews, North Carolina. Only a Vine this memorable could seed the tagline of a teen viral video two years later, “Damn Daniel.” Vine even gave Merriam-Webster its 2015 Word of The Year: On fleek, a phrase which was coined on Vine. And coined by a black teen girl, in particular. The genius devisers of Vine culture were not just young people, but young people of color, whose ideas dominated the service in a way akin to no other mass tech platform. Black Twitter is a vital vein of the larger social network, for instance, but it’s only one
part of the whole; teens of color, meanwhile, credibly created Vine’s mainstream. Black teens took Vine (and their friends and their fans) into their classrooms, school buses, and bedrooms, which turned Vine into one vanguard of a larger and ongoing shift of mass cultural attention to women and people of color. In that unresolved revolution, later historians might say Vine played as large a role as Tumblr and even Twitter itself. (But see unresolved: In Vine’s case, all that culture building partly served to enrich Twitter’s board, which remains overwhelmingly white and male.) Nothing gold can stay. Vine had been struggling against Instagram and Snapchat, the new kings of teen video. In May of this year, a third-party firm noted that Vine engagement was at an all-time low. And many Vine stars—those young adults who achieved larger notoriety off their stunts and good looks— had already taken Vine links out of their bios as they moved to larger, higher profile, and more lucrative platforms, including YouTube and Facebook. A different company might have saved Vine— or at least sold it off. But Twitter, no average tech firm, has lately been mired in its own dramas. Since going public in October 2013, it’s limped from one crisis to another, never achieving the Facebook or Google-like profit margins that investors dreamed of—or, for that matter, profit at all. It has tried out one new feature after another, each with the goal of expanding Twitter’s core user base; none have suc-
ceeded. Now, it is laying off 9 percent of its staff— presumably this includes almost all of the Vine employees—as it staggers toward financial health. Had Twitter chosen to listen to its users a few years ago, Vine might be alive today. As prominent women and people of color have been telling Twitter for at least two years, the service has a mass harassment problem. Twitter has never substantively tried to fix this issue. When it went looking for buyers earlier this month, some familyfriendly bidders—including Disney—wouldn’t touch it because of its reputation for out-of-control racist, misogynist, and anti-Semitic cyberbullying. Twitter now says it is working on tools to combat that problem and that some of the features targeting it should be released next month. It’s long made promises like this, though, so I’ll believe when I see it. And the change in approach wasn’t enough to save Vine—meaning that one of the most generative communities of people of color online was destroyed in part by Twitter Nazis, on Twitter Inc.’s watch. And with Vine’s death comes the larger passing of an era of the social internet. Instagram, Vine’s more corporate and more profitable older cousin, has never matched Vine’s ecstatic creativity, but it’s what we’re left with now. The sprawling and manic and often kind social web has been conquered by Facebook, and what lies immediately in front of us seems duller, more reactionary, and more clearly corporate than what we just passed through.
She is a Superhero!
The protagonists in these comics are singular women without any superpowers, interesting and fierce
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Radhika Singh
he doesn’t rocket through the sky, or have luscious hair flying behind her, nor does her spandex outfit shape her breasts. Instead, this superhero has her hair tied in a rather unglamorous bun, with the pallu of her Navvari sari firmly tucked in. And she doesn’t rely on a superpower to fight evil; she terrorizes wrongdoers with her extreme rage and a vocabulary of Marathi swear words. Comic world, make way for Angry Maushi. She belongs to India’s latest brand of female superheroes — characters that are heroic in a very human way. Take for instance Widhwa Ma and Andhi Behen, a mother and daughter duo, who flick away their cigarettes in style as they go about solving mysteries. And then there is Priya of Priya’s Shakti, a rape survivor who rides a tiger and urges people to bring a change in the society. While these characters have been around for a couple of years, their consistent rise in popularity reflects a growing acceptance of female characters, who don’t belong to the spandex-sporting stereotype. It also points to the increase in female readership in an industry where women protagonists are rare. Abhijeet Kini, the author of Angry Maushi, wanted to create a character that was symbolic of Mumbai. You don’t argue with Angry Maushi, and heaven help you if you’re in her way on the train back home. She stalks the streets of Mumbai, beating up crooked politicians and other miscreants. Her biggest enemy is Mr Minister, who plans on taking over Mumbai, hell, and then the rest of the world — in that order. “Spandex-clad or mythological characters don’t strike a chord with today’s audience,” says Kini, and that “she’s angry about the same things everyone else is” what makes her relatable. Priya of Priya’s Shakti,
on the other hand, tries to anger people out of complacency. Producer and cocreator Ram Devineni was in Delhi when the horrific gang rape of 2012 took place. Propelled by the need to challenge deep-rooted patriarchal views, Devineni, in collaboration with illustrator Dan Goldman, conceived of Priya. After Priya is raped, she turns to goddess Parvati for help. “She gives Priya the strength to conquer her fears, and she goes on to motivate other people to challenge gender-based violence,” says Devineni. In the story, Priya confronts the tiger that has been stalking her, and turns her fear, the tiger, into her power, or shakti. Like Angry Maushi, Priya doesn’t have any real superpowers. “No bulky, god-like beings can ever solve society’s problems,” says Devineni. “There is nothing spectacular about catching a bullet between your teeth,” says Devineni. Priya’s strength is that she empowers other rape survivors and counters society’s attempts at victim shaming. Priya’s appeal lies in her universality. The series has had over 5,00,000 downloads, of which a twothird are from the US, the UK and Canada, followed by Brazil and Italy. On October 22, Ram Devineni and Dan Goldman, the comic’s illustrator, will be launching Priya’s Mirror, the latest book in the series, which focuses on acid attack survivors. In this ladies’ club, Widh-
wa Ma, Andhi Behen is an aberrance, for the series makes no social commentary. “I am obsessed with films from the ’70s, where the hero would do unscrupulous things to support his widhwa ma and andhi behen. I decided to flip things around so that they did the saving,” says creator Jatin Varma. Widhwa Ma, Andhi Behen is for people who love movies — and irreverence. What could be more shocking than a white sari-clad widow holding a gun, cruising alongside her blind daughter who loves a good swear word or two, in a bright red convertible? They’re detectives solving crimes for Bollywood and interact with characters like Dharmendra and Big Boss Salman. Their first case is to take down the ghost of AK Hangal, who is, in fact, quite alive. “It’s a fun, easy read,” Varma says. While these ladies may be gaining popularity among comic lovers, they also are a reminder that the comic industry remains male-centric — these series have all been authored by men. And, as Varma confesses, not many men are comfortable writing female characters. Kini intentionally does not give Angry Maushi a husband or children; he admits he didn’t want to be seen as putting women into one role or another. “I didn’t want people to say if she’s a superhero, why is she cooking? Once you introduce family and children, you’re in danger of making things stereotypical,” he says.