six seconds of fame

I am approaching what I prefer to term a “milestone birthday”, and I certainly don’t feel anything like what that milestone implies.  I’m fit, have plenty of energy, still like to go out late at night, and retain unjaded enthusiasm for new experiences, ideas, and adventures.  One thing that makes me feel old, though, is the media’s insistence on turning baby boomers out to pasture. I am getting so sick of old media fawning over new media.

A good example of this was an article in last Thursday’s New York Times Style section, “Perfecting the Goofy Vine”.  “Mention ‘ that French guy’ to typical teenagers today and they will know exactly which French guy you are talking about”, the article begins.  The French guy, apparently, is a 24 year old, Jerome Jarre, who’s gained fame by making six second comic videos on a phone app called vine.  These brilliant blips feature such exciting videolets as Jarre dancing in front of a bathroom mirror (he is boy band cute) or deep insights such as “spend your life doing strange things with weird people”. His posts have over a billion views.  All of this is described breathlessly in a tone that implies that if you haven’t heard of Jarre you must have been hiding under a rock for the past year.

In that I am evidently uncool I decided to test out this theory with cool millenials.  I asked my 32 year old daughter if she had heard of Jarre.  She’d heard tell of Vine (never seen it) but not Jarre.  I asked my 29 year old son.  Jarre?  Nope.  At first he said he hadn’t heard of Vine, but then he thought about it.  “Isn’t that a video streaming app?” he asked.   When I informed him it streamed six second videos he was appalled.  “I don’t watch that crap,” he said.  It occurred  to me that maybe even these children of mine were too old to be cool, so I asked my youngest son, a genuine 14 year old teenager.  I guess he’s not “typical” because he’d never heard of Jarre.  He had heard of Vine, though.  Some of his friends watched it, though he hastened to add, not his good friends.  “It’s the stupidest thing ever,  ” he added.  “It’s like Twitter for videos.”

Our whole family had a good time with coming up with ridiculous six second videos.  Our favorite was an “artsy fartsy” series, featuring six second displays of fashionable flatulence.  Unfortunately, our cumulative stupidometer is set too high to allow us to actually move forward with this potentially profitable idea.  Watching all these media people desperately trying to appear cool and relevant reminds me of when I was a cool teenager and adults wanted to “rap about groovy things” with me.  Just because something has one million views doesn’t mean its not trite and banal. There is not much one can get across in six seconds.  At most, you can create a momentary sensation, as profound as scratching an itch.  Isn’t anyone brave enough to admit that the emperor has no clothes?     Now that I know I’m not an isolated curmudgeon, let me note:  there is a vanishing point beyond which the succinct becomes meaningless.