Introducing: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)

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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, this is Jamie Loftus and this is my new
weekly show, Sixteenth 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

(00:20):
with more.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Attention than the human psyche can handle.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
If you've listened to solo podcasts of mine before, think
My Year in Mensa, will.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Lead a podcast act cast Ghost Church.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
You can expect the same kind of freaky hyper focus
and 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.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
And I can almost guarantee.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
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 and
early twenty fifteen, 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

(01:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
It's a weird little story.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
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 I sorry.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
This is not a fun show.

Speaker 1 (01:41):
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

(02:01):
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

(02:24):
into the real and true cesspit that we know it
as today.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
It was shortly before the stories that.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
Usership at all costs and on a long enough timeline.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
The story of the dress is one entangled with abuse
and media exploitation.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
So is it a harmless.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
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

(03:10):
developed into the freaky three headed dragon we know it
as today.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Together, we might not be able to.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
Properly log out, almost certainly we won't, but we can
take a walk down scary Internet memory lane and see
one day.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
A little more clearly.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
Internet history is a tricky thing to be invested in.
It feels like every time a bad word business billionaire
buys up another platform, history starts being erased. With the
team that cools on media, We're taking these characters sixteenth
minute of Fame to see what their moment meant to
them and what it says about us.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
So listen to sixteenth

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Minute of Fame on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.