The Vine videos that rise to the top of the heap typically feature dance routines, quick-cut pranks and the occasional clever stop-motion short. But if you tap into the video-sharing app’s raw “fire hose,” a different picture emerges. For example, VPeeker — a site that provides an unending stream of recent Vine uploads — reveals that buried beneath those popular Vines lies a less visible but more intriguing trend: six-second displays of normalcy. Rather than killing time at the mall, in a Spencer’s Gifts or the food court, young people are filming themselves doing the incredibly mundane: goofing around in a backyard pool, lounging on basement couches, whatever; in other words, recording the minutiae of their lives and uploading it for not very many to see. New services are stepping in too, offering the immediacy Vine cannot. There’s Meerkat, which lets people broadcast video feeds from their phones of what they’re doing at any particular moment. There’s YouNow, which is like Meerkat but primarily the domain of teenagers, who use it to stream video of themselves, bored, at home, in their bedrooms. (For now, it’s totally innocent.) A cynic might dismiss all this obsessive self-documentation as evidence of generational narcissism, but you could just as easily choose to view it as a developing global pastime. Call it borecore: the never-to-be-viral output that comes from mixing powerful devices and a lifetime of social-­media training with regular, old teenage boredom. Seen this way, its predecessors are more prosaic than pathological: doodling in a composition notebook, making scrapbooks, driving around aimlessly. But that simplicity, that sameness, can feel magical when you binge on it: a series of furtive glimpses into the lives of people across the country and around the world doing a whole lot of nothing. Though the technology available to us has far exceeded our wildest imaginations, it’s still perfectly suited to filling those moments when our imaginations just won’t do.