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