There Are No Girls on the Internet - Introducing Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)

00:00:00.080 Hey, this is Jamie Loftus, and this is my new weekly show, 16th Minute of Fame, the

00:00:06.440 podcast where every episode, I take a closer look at an internet character of the day.

00:00:11.640 Who were they?

00:00:12.620 What made them so notorious?

00:00:14.660 How did the internet, or sometimes the algorithm, choose them?

00:00:18.540 And what does a person do when they're suddenly confronted with more attention than the human

00:00:22.360 psyche can handle?

00:00:23.900 If you've listened to solo podcasts of mine before, think My Urine Mensa, Lolita Podcast,

00:00:28.980 act cast ghost church you can expect the same kind of freaky hyper focus and research and yes

00:00:34.940 air horns not apologizing for it as well as a lot of interviews with experts things will get serious

00:00:41.000 sometimes but i'm mainly here to have fun and try to bottle these little bits of internet history

00:00:46.060 that feel like they're slipping away from us and i can almost guarantee that you've heard of a lot

00:00:51.400 of these stories already but probably not after the day they were considered relevant online

00:00:56.900 Take The Dress, a story that went uber-viral in early 2015 in spite of being, well, kind

00:01:03.200 of a boring optical illusion.

00:01:05.580 A mother of the bride in Scotland took a picture of a dress she was thinking about wearing

00:01:09.540 to her daughter's wedding.

00:01:11.220 But she saw the dress as blue with black lace, and her daughter saw it as white with gold

00:01:17.420 lace.

00:01:18.320 One BuzzFeed post later, every single person on the internet was talking about the dress

00:01:23.600 and getting into arguments about why their friend's eyeballs were broken.

00:01:28.820 It's a weird little story.

00:01:30.480 It's not every day that you find yourself weighing in

00:01:32.540 on the same boring topic of the day as Taylor Swift.

00:01:35.620 But there's a lot more to this story than meets the eye.

00:01:39.580 Sorry, this is not a pun show.

00:01:41.520 I am not that person, except for right now in the trailer.

00:01:45.620 But never again.

00:01:47.380 And there's a lot of interesting things that stemmed from the story of the dress,

00:01:51.760 including a pretty interesting discovery in ocular science.

00:01:55.640 But to me, The Dress is a story about the last couple of months

00:01:58.880 when the internet was still sort of fun.

00:02:01.500 It went viral the same day that the net neutrality decision went through.

00:02:05.260 It was a success of peak clickbait,

00:02:07.320 the sorts of websites that underpaid some of your favorite working writers today

00:02:11.400 and were designed to monetize the internet

00:02:13.720 in a way that traditional news sources had never figured out.

00:02:17.580 It was just a month before Trump announced his candidacy for president,

00:02:20.680 taking an already polarized internet and turning it into the real and true cesspit that we know it

00:02:26.540 as today. It was shortly before the stories that spread across the internet stopped being driven

00:02:31.440 by exploited millennials with useless arts degrees and started being decided by algorithms

00:02:37.120 hell-bent on growing internet usership at all costs. And on a long enough timeline,

00:02:43.040 the story of the dress is one entangled with abuse and media exploitation. So is it a harmless,

00:02:49.160 goofy optical illusion story? Yeah, but it's also a lot more than that. I'll be talking to internet

00:02:55.520 historians, experts, and yes, main characters themselves, to get a fuller picture. Because I

00:03:01.660 think that even outside these individual experiences, a character of the day tells us

00:03:06.320 something about how the internet worked at that time, and how the attention economy developed

00:03:10.900 into the freaky three-headed dragon we know it as today. Together, we might not be able to

00:03:16.340 properly log out, almost certainly we won't, but we can take a walk down scary internet memory lane

00:03:22.620 and see one day a little more clearly. Internet history is a tricky thing to be invested in.

00:03:29.480 It feels like every time a bad-with-business billionaire buys up another platform,

00:03:33.720 history starts being erased. With the team at CoolZone Media, we're taking these characters'

00:03:38.940 16th Minute of Fame to see what their moment meant to them and what it says about us.

00:03:43.620 So listen to 16th Minute of Fame on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There Are No Girls on the Internet - June 01, 2024

Introducing Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)

Episode Stats

Transcript