Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - Introducing: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) is a weekly show that gives a sixteenth minute of fame to the Internet's most notorious characters of the day. Jamie Loftus talks to the characters themselves, and tries to get to the bottom of how they made it to the top of your feed for a fleeting moment -- and what that does to warp your brain.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, this is Jamie Loftus. And this is my new weekly show, 16th Minute of Fame, the podcast where every episode, I take a closer look at an internet character of the day. Who were they? What made them so notorious? How did the internet, or sometimes the algorithm, choose them? And what does a person do when they're suddenly confronted with more attention than the human psyche can handle? If you've listened to solo podcasts of mine before, think Myirin Mensa, Lolita podcast, Actcast, Ghost Church. You can expect the same kind of freaky hyper-focus in research, and yes, air horns, not apologizing for it, as well as a lot of interviews with experts. Things will get serious sometimes, but I'm mainly here to have fun and try to bottle these little bits of internet history that feel

like they're slipping away from us. And I can almost guarantee that you've heard of a lot of these stories already, but probably not after the day they were considered relevant online. Take the dress, a story that went uber viral in early 2015 in spite of being, well, kind of a boring optical illusion. A mother of the bride in Scotland took a picture of a dress she was thinking about wearing to her daughter's wedding. But she saw the dress as blue with black lace and her daughter saw it as white with gold lace. One buzzfeed post later, every single person on the internet was talking about the dress and getting into arguments about why their friend's eyeballs were broken. It's a weird little story.

It's not every day that you find yourself weighing in on the same boring topic of the day as Taylor Swift. But there's a lot more to this story than meets the eye. Sorry, this is not a pun show. I am not that person except for right now in the trailer, but never again. And there's a lot of interesting things that stemmed from the story of the dress, including a pretty interesting discovery in ocular science. But to me, the dress is a story about the last couple of months when the internet was still sort of fun.

It went viral the same day that the net neutrality decision went through. It was a success of peak clickbait, the sorts of websites that underpaid some of your favorite working writers today and were designed to monetize the internet in a way that traditional news sources had never figured out. It was just a month before Trump announced his candidacy for president, taking an already polarized internet and turning it into the real and true cesspit that we know it as today. It was shortly before the stories that spread across the internet stopped being driven by exploited millennials with useless arts degrees

and started being decided by algorithms hell-bent on growing internet usership at all costs. And on a long enough timeline, the story of the dress is one entangled with abuse and media exploitation. So is it a harmless, goofy optical illusion story? Yeah, but it's also a lot more than that. I'll be talking to Internet historians, experts, and, yes, main characters themselves, to get a fuller picture. Because I think that even outside these individual experiences, a character of the day tells us something about how the Internet worked at that time, and how the attention economy developed into the freaky, three-headed dragon we know it as today. Together, we might not be able to properly log out, almost certainly we won't, but we can take a walker.

down scary internet memory lane and see one day a little more clearly. Internet history is a tricky thing to be invested in. It feels like every time a bad with business billionaire buys up another platform, history starts being erased. With the team at Cool Zone Media, we're taking these characters 16th Minute of Fame to see what their moment meant to them and what it says about us. So listen to 16th Minute of Fame on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you.