Let me start by saying that of all the social media platforms, including YouTube, I love the idea of Vine best.  Seriously, what could be better than a six-second video?

But Vine has got me thinking about social media in general and it’s making me wonder why everything in the social mediasphere is by necessity not very social.  Instead of truly engaging and being “social,” it is all about spitting out short messages or short videos or short slide shows or whatever… just so long as it is short. We have become a nation of soundbite experts.

Is this a commentary on our attention spans?  Remember I told you about that guy with the t-shirt that said “My wife says I have a short attention span, but…. oh, look, a squirrel.” Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, it doesn’t matter.  Even if we spend hours on these sites, we rarely spend more than 10 seconds on any one topic or photo or video or discussion.  Maybe we are squirrels or at least squirrely.  I mean what’s the big need to make everything shorter and faster?

Or maybe it is the influence of politics today: “Say less more often and nod a lot.” Or maybe we’ve all been multi-tasking too much for too long and the idea of investing more than six seconds of our attention on any one things is just unreasonable.

Oh well, I’ve already exceeded my allotted time to post, so I will simply offer you my current favorite Vine video:  Stop Drawing Me!