Do It For The Vine: Social Media Analysis

During my time in London at the London School of Economics, I would often lay in my flat browsing the Internet in efforts to stay abreast with the popular culture circulating through America. With the vast amount of information that I as a millennial ingest daily, it is rare that something catches my eye and warrants further examination. In January of 2014, I watched a six second video clip on a digital service known as Vine where a little girl was repeatedly asked ‘Do It For the Vine’. Her reply was met with a soft, but powerful beat that surrounded her words ‘I Ain’t Gon’ Do It’. As the clip continued on, the young child proceeded to dance with glee and created one of the most adorable images that I have seen on the Internet this year. This

According to an infographic complied from several media and marketing sources by TAMBA Inc., Vine’s users share video content through Twitter at least 5 times per second, driving the growth of video in the realm of internet traffic to 55% by 2016 (Hammond 2014). This frequency of content sharing reveals how digitally savvy this youthful generation is becoming, allowing for technological fluency that remains unmatched in comparison to previous generations. Included in this digital realm are other social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, among others whose websites have created an interconnectedness that has fundamentally transformed the way that we share and

It was only 20 years ago that the administration of Bill Clinton launched the first website for the White House (Mckinney 2011). At the time, only 23% of American households had a computer with Internet access (Carroll 2005), leaving the Clinton Administration’s website potential largely untapped. Progressively, the use of email and other personal forms of digital communication were slowly being integrated throughout the political landscape. By the mid-2000s, Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean sought to experiment with the capability of the Internet and utilize it within his campaign. The result of Dean’s experiment led to numerous campaign meet-ups and voter mobilization all led through a digital network (Carpenter 2007). Within the years that followed, the strategy was to be employed once again within the party as then Senator Obama ran his primary campaign. Being dubbed the “Youtube Election” during the 2007 primary cycle by a slew of journalist, politicians, and techies at the Personal Democracy forum, the discussion around how to fully utilize the Internet and other web 2.0 applications during future elections came to be (Heyboer