Episode Transcript
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0:00
Hey, this is Jamie Loftus and
0:02
this is my new weekly show, Sixteenth
0:05
Minute of Fame, the podcast where
0:07
every episode I take a closer look
0:09
at an Internet character of the day. Who
0:11
were they, what made them so notorious,
0:14
how did the internet or sometimes the
0:16
algorithm choose them? And what does
0:18
a person do when they're suddenly confronted with
0:21
more.
0:21
Attention than the human psyche can handle.
0:23
If you've listened to solo podcasts of mine before,
0:26
think My Year in Mensa, will.
0:28
Lead a podcast act cast Ghost
0:30
Church.
0:31
You can expect the same kind of freaky hyper focus
0:33
and research and yes air horns
0:36
not apologizing for it, as well
0:38
as a lot of interviews with experts. Things
0:40
will get serious sometimes, but I'm mainly
0:42
here to have fun and try to bottle these
0:44
little bits of Internet history that feel like
0:46
they're slipping away from us.
0:48
And I can almost guarantee.
0:50
That you've heard of a lot of these stories already,
0:52
but probably not after the day they were considered
0:55
relevant online. Take the
0:57
Dress, a story that went uber viral
0:59
and early twenty fifteen, in spite of being
1:02
well kind of a boring optical illusion,
1:05
A mother of the bride in Scotland took a picture
1:07
of a dress she was thinking about wearing to her
1:09
daughter's wedding, but she
1:12
saw the dress as blue with black lace,
1:15
and her daughter saw it as white with gold
1:17
lace. One BuzzFeed post
1:19
later, every single person on
1:21
the Internet was talking about the dress
1:23
and getting into arguments about why their
1:26
friend's eyeballs were broken.
1:28
It's a weird little story.
1:30
It's not every day that you find yourself weighing in
1:32
on the same boring topic of the day as Taylor
1:34
Swift. But there's a lot more to this
1:37
story than meets the I sorry.
1:40
This is not a fun show.
1:41
I am not that person except for right
1:43
now in the trailer, but
1:46
never again. And there's
1:48
a lot of interesting things that stemmed from the
1:50
story of the dress, including a pretty
1:52
interesting discovery in ocular science.
1:55
But to me, the dress is a story about
1:57
the last couple of months when the Internet was still
2:00
sort of fun. It went viral
2:02
the same day that the net neutrality decision
2:04
went through. It was a success of peak
2:06
clickbait, the sorts of websites that
2:08
underpaid some of your favorite working writers
2:11
today and were designed to monetize
2:13
the Internet in a way that traditional news
2:15
sources had never figured out. It
2:17
was just a month before Trump announced his candidacy
2:20
for president, taking an already polarized
2:22
Internet and turning it into the real and
2:25
true cesspit that we know it as today.
2:27
It was shortly before the stories that.
2:29
Spread across the Internet stopped being driven
2:31
by exploited millennials with useless arts
2:33
degrees and started being decided
2:36
by algorithms hell bent on growing
2:38
Internet.
2:39
Usership at all costs and
2:41
on a long enough timeline.
2:43
The story of the dress is one entangled with
2:45
abuse and media exploitation.
2:48
So is it a harmless.
2:49
Goofy optical illusion story. Yeah,
2:52
but it's also a lot more than that. I'll
2:54
be talking to Internet historians, experts,
2:57
and yes, main characters themselves
2:59
to get a fuller picture, because I
3:01
think that even outside these individual
3:03
experiences, a character of the day
3:05
tells us something about how the Internet worked
3:08
at that time and how the attention economy
3:10
developed into the freaky three headed dragon
3:13
we know it as today.
3:14
Together, we might not be able to.
3:16
Properly log out, almost certainly we
3:18
won't, but we can take a walk
3:20
down scary Internet memory lane and
3:23
see one day.
3:24
A little more clearly.
3:26
Internet history is a tricky thing to be invested
3:28
in. It feels like every time a bad
3:30
word business billionaire buys up another platform,
3:33
history starts being erased. With
3:36
the team that cools on media, We're taking
3:38
these characters sixteenth minute of Fame
3:40
to see what their moment meant to them and
3:42
what it says about us.
3:44
So listen to sixteenth
3:45
Minute of Fame on the iHeartRadio app,
3:47
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
3:49
your podcasts.
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