Twitter's video sharing app, Vine, launched on Friday and, like pretty much anything popular on the Internet, it's already become infested with porn. But Vine's many vices don't just end with T and A snaps! As The Daily Dot discovered, a ton of people are using Vine to show off their marijuana habit, six-second video loops at time. There are people smoking bowls, ripping bongs, and showing off heady stashs. Here's the kicker: By using tags like #420, #weedporn, #weed, etc, these people are making it really, really easy for the general public at large to see who's smokin' up, too.
For example, there's this, via Stonercast:
And this, via Slick Rick:
More examples over at The Daily Dot.
While it's certainly nice to have a Twitter-synched video app to share one's hobbies, no way is this a good idea (…unless you live in Washington or Colorado). In September 2012, police in Australia started using Instagram to track down photos of marijuana users. At the time, a police spokesperson in Victoria warned: “Anyone who posts images of this nature may find themselves subject to a criminal investigation should there be evidence of possession or cultivation of drugs of dependence or illicit substances.”
In a perfect world, that alone should be reason enough to not Tweet, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, etc, etc, etc photos of your “dope bubblegum kush yumyum.” But people still do it.
Why?
The deeper issue here isn't just unnecessary incrimination: It's chronic personal oversharing. It's become our sex. It is our sex. In fact, some say it's psychologically better than sex. It's causing a lot of personal stupidity, too.
In a world where people feel the need to Tweet or Facebook pictures of lunches from a food cart, Twitter's Vine becomes just another tool to feed the callus epidemic of narcissism. Even if when it's something quite against the law, like smoking pot. It's hundreds of millions of people on social networks collectively shouting “HEY, look at me! What I'm doing is special, damnit and you need to look at it.” It's same driving human tick that causes people to litter Facebook and Twitter with junk from their personal lives, like engagement ring bragging and breakup whining.
Millions of years of biological, social, and technological evolution and we've all become the equivalent of little kids throwing a temper tantrum in the ice cream aisle of a grocery store. Everything that once was private and personal must be shared to the public masses in order to validate our existence. It's sad.
I love social media. I love having a platform to blurt out random observations or the things that pop into my head every once in a while. I love live-tweeting Monday Night Raw and making snarky comments about how professional athletes aren't the “heroes” the mainstream sports media builds them up to be. Because I can do this, I think it's revolutionary technology. But not everything in your life needs to be uploaded to a social network or shared in 140 characters or less.
Learn to keep it in, people.
Follow me on Twitter here.
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