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Hey, this is Jamie Loftus and this

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is my new weekly show 16th

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minute of Fame the podcast where

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every episode I take a closer look at

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an internet character of the day Who

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were they what made them so notorious? How

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did the internet or sometimes the algorithm

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choose them and what does a person

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do when they're suddenly Confronted with 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 Think

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my urine Mensa Lolita podcast a

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cast ghost church You

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can expect the same kind of freaky

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hyper focus and research and yes air

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horns not Apologizing for it as well

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as a lot of interviews with experts

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things will get serious sometimes But I'm mainly

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here to have fun and try to bottle

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these little bits of internet history that feel

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like they're slipping away From us and

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I can almost guarantee that you've heard of

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a lot of these stories already But probably

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not after the day they were considered relevant

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online Take the

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dress a story that went uber viral in

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early 2015 in spite of

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being well kind of a

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boring optical illusion a Mother

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of the bride in Scotland took a picture of

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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 and white with

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gold lace One BuzzFeed post

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later every single person on

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the internet was talking about the

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dress and getting into arguments about

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why their Friends eyeballs were broken.

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It's a weird little story It's not

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every day that you find yourself weighing in on the

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same boring topic of the day as Taylor Swift But

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there's a lot more to this story than meets

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the eye Sorry, this

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is not a fun show. I am

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NOT that person except for right now

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in the trailer But never

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again and There's

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a lot of interesting things that stemmed

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from the story of the dress including

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a pretty 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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It went viral the same

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day that the net neutrality decision went through.

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It was a success of peak click dates, the

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sorts of websites that underpaid some of

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your favorite working writers today and were

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designed to monetize the internet in a

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way that traditional news sources had never

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figured out. It was just

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a month before Trump announced his candidacy

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for president, taking an already polarized internet

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and turning it into the real and

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true cesspit that we know it as

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today. It was shortly

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before the stories that spread across

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the internet stopped being driven by

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exploited millennials with useless arts degrees

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and started being decided by algorithms

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hellbent on growing internet userships at

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all costs. And on

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a long enough timeline, the story of the dress

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is one entangled with abuse and media

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exploitation. So

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is it a harmless, juicy optical illusion

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story? Yeah, but it's also

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a lot more than that. I'll be

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talking to internet historians, experts, and yes,

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main characters themselves to get

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a fuller picture. Because

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I think that even outside these individual

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experiences, a character of the

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day tells us something about how the internet

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worked at that time and how the attention

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economy developed into the freaky three headed dragon

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we know it as today. Together,

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we might not be able to properly

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log out, almost certainly we won't, but

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we can take a walk down scary

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internet memory lane and see one day

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a little more clearly. Internet

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history is a tricky thing to be invested in. It

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feels like every time a bad with

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business billionaire buys up another platform, history

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starts being erased. With

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the team that calls on media, we're taking

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these characters 16th minute of fame to see

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what their moment meant to them and what it

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says about us. So listen

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to 16th minute of fame on the

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iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get

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to vote for your podcast.