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Hey, this is Jamie Loftus and

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this is my new weekly show, Sixteenth

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Minute of Fame, the podcast where

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every episode I take a closer look

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at an Internet character of the day. Who

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were they, what made them so notorious,

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how did the internet or sometimes the

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algorithm choose them? And what does

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a person do when they're suddenly confronted with

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more.

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Attention than the human psyche can handle.

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If you've listened to solo podcasts of mine before,

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think My Year in Mensa, will.

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Lead a podcast act cast Ghost

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Church.

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You can expect the same kind of freaky hyper focus

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and research and yes air horns

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not apologizing for it, as well

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as a lot of interviews with experts. Things

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will get serious sometimes, but I'm mainly

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here to have fun and try to bottle these

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little bits of Internet history that feel like

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they're slipping away from us.

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And I can almost guarantee.

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That you've heard of a lot of these stories already,

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but probably not after the day they were considered

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relevant online. Take the

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Dress, a story that went uber viral

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and early twenty fifteen, in spite of being

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well kind of a boring optical illusion,

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A mother of the bride in Scotland took a picture

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of a dress she was thinking about wearing to her

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daughter's wedding, but she

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saw the dress as blue with black lace,

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and her daughter saw it as white with gold

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lace. One BuzzFeed post

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later, every single person on

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the Internet was talking about the dress

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and getting into arguments about why their

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friend's eyeballs were broken.

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It's a weird little story.

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It's not every day that you find yourself weighing in

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on the same boring topic of the day as Taylor

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Swift. But there's a lot more to this

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story than meets the I sorry.

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This is not a fun show.

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I am not that person except for right

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now in the trailer, but

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never again. And there's

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a lot of interesting things that stemmed from the

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story of the dress, including a pretty

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interesting discovery in ocular science.

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But to me, the dress is a story about

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the last couple of months when the Internet was still

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sort of fun. It went viral

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the same day that the net neutrality decision

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went through. It was a success of peak

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clickbait, the sorts of websites that

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underpaid some of your favorite working writers

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today and were designed to monetize

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the Internet in a way that traditional news

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sources had never figured out. It

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was just a month before Trump announced his candidacy

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for president, taking an already polarized

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Internet and turning it into the real and

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true cesspit that we know it as today.

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It was shortly before the stories that.

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Spread across the Internet stopped being driven

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by exploited millennials with useless arts

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degrees and started being decided

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by algorithms hell bent on growing

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Internet.

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Usership at all costs and

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on a long enough timeline.

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The story of the dress is one entangled with

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abuse and media exploitation.

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So is it a harmless.

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Goofy optical illusion story. Yeah,

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but it's also a lot more than that. I'll

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be talking to Internet historians, experts,

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and yes, main characters themselves

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to get a fuller picture, because I

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think that even outside these individual

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experiences, a character of the day

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tells us something about how the Internet worked

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at that time and how the attention economy

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developed into the freaky three headed dragon

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we know it as today.

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Together, we might not be able to.

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Properly log out, almost certainly we

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won't, but we can take a walk

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down scary Internet memory lane and

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see one day.

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A little more clearly.

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Internet history is a tricky thing to be invested

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in. It feels like every time a bad

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word business billionaire buys up another platform,

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history starts being erased. With

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the team that cools on media, We're taking

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these characters sixteenth minute of Fame

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to see what their moment meant to them and

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what it says about us.

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So listen to sixteenth

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Minute of Fame on the iHeartRadio app,

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

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your podcasts.