#1 - Facebook

It was the decade when...

You were your status update.

100 days, 100 trends. And what tops our survey? What trend of the aughts surpasses all others?

Obviously, the Internet played a massive role in the aughts. Perhaps the major role. Our connection with our friends, lovers, and acquaintances was mediated by the information superhighway. And those who controlled the means of communication controlled our lives. The aughts saw a grand drama of competing social networking sites striving for our allegiance and online devotion. What began as a Friendster flurry quickly morphed into MySpace mania. With MySpace it appeared, for a brief respite, that the general populace had agreed unilaterally on a social networking site to triumph over all others. But alas, the actual site proved unwieldy, prone to profiles of women of ill repute and myriad alt-rock bands promoting their latest faux Arcade Fire-esque album. The neatness and clarity of Friendster was lost in the graphic overload. MySpace could not sustain itself. Another social network was required to bring us together.

Enter Mark Zukerberg, Harvard Sophomore and future billionaire. After beginning his nascent website in 2003 (from his dorm room) as a social network for Ivy League students only, it was only a matter of time before the burgeoning entrepreneur realized the potential of his new creation. Originally called "The Facebook," one received immediate cache upon invitation, in the early days at least. A world away from MySpace's free-for-all webpage design structure, "Facebook" (the "the" was dropped early on) was a clean, organized way to present your internet identity to the world. Once the site went fully mainstream, accessible to any and everyone, it vanquished it's rivals, dominating the social networking market to this day. Overnight Zukerberg's elitist online club became a social force to rival Google.

So why? What is it about Facebook? How did an elitist online club for Ivy-League brats turn into the most important trend of the decade? As in comedy the answer is always: timing, timing and timing. The world of social networking was being explored as far back as AOL Member Profiles (Remember those?) and the early aughts proved a viable crucible for competing design schemes and website structures. In retrospect it should have been clear to all media barons that Social Networking was bound to become a central part of social reality in the 21st Century and yet the major Internet tech companies like Google and Microsoft offered little in this format. Social Networking, thank God, was left to the amateurs and entrepreneurs. It was just a matter of which site found the secret ingredients to provide the most viable and addictive service. The alchemy of Internet success in this arena was, as yet, a mystery. The turning point was when Facebook opened up it's website to open-source 3rd-party applications, facilitating all manner of programs and services on the site. Sure, most of these applications ended up annoying users, like the ubiquitous "poking" applications, but overall the business plan was steady and open to endless improvement. In short order, Facebook went from an alternative social network for those outside the MySpace universe to the only viable convergence point of social networking on the Internet.

Facebook has become as much a place as a website. A nexus of actual identity and web persona, Facebook is both a representation of a person's external self and a subjective representation of their own sense of identity. Online chats, wall commentary, photo tagging, private messaging - all have become as substantial as most corporeal interchanges between persons, the virtual realm asserting itself as not merely a supplement to "real" interaction but a full-on replacement of it.

A person's Facebook page is a delicate destination. A locus of personal thoughts and feelings as articulated by a user's myriad preferences in books, movies and television shows, Facebook is also a repository for evidence about an individual's social side, with endless tagged photographs of a subject bleary-eyed at drunken parties or other such embarrassing candid moments. As the site has grown to dominate its market Facebook's users (meaning about everyone) have only grown to rely on the site more and more. Reading one's friends one-line status updates with the ferocity of a Talmudic scholar, one's social connections are as virtual now as they are real. Were are not replacing the real, merely expanding it's boundaries. This expansion, the dissolution of borders between actual and virtual identity, is the aughts' greatest legacy. A legacy that will only continue to grow and expand as our technology further blurs our knee-jerk notions about reality and the way in which we interact with it and each other.

Facebook was the victor in the aughts' battles of social networking. The site is a crossroads for all travelers to swap stories and exchange ideas, to post photos and update one's "stutus," which, when considered existentially, is quite an update to make on a daily basis. Facebook is now embedded in the very texture of contemporary society; to not be a part of it is to withdraw in some extent from modernity itself, so sweeping is the influence of Zukerberg's creation.

And for these myriad reasons we find Facebook the aughts' most influential and important trend. Now excuse me while I update my profile with the news.

You AUGHT to remember.

#4 - YouTube

It was the decade when...

We got a whole new kind of boob tube to waste our time on.

Once upon a time there was no YouTube. That time: 2004. Not so long ago. YouTube released its Beta version in February of 2005. It officially launched in November of that year. By 2006 it was impossible to imagine life without the site. I think the wheel took longer to be embraced upon invention. By the end of 2006, TIME magazine was calling "You" the person of the year and everything from entertainment to politics had been transformed by the still nascent website. Though there had long been video on the Internet, the perception of the World Wide Web pre aught-five was still that of a primarily text based interface. YouTube was a major catalyst in turning the internet into the multimedia platform it is today. The site was the most democratic form of media distribution ever invented, handing to the laymen the opportunity to turn their private home videos and amateur mini-movies into cultural phenomenon at no cost whatsoever. Sure competition was stiff but, when a video did break through the cacophonous din and "went viral," shared from one user to the next like an internet social disease, the impact was felt from coast to coast, water-cooler conversations all but dominated by suggestions of clips to view.

Given the multiplicity of content on YouTube, its interesting that the website still has the reputation of being, essentially, the worlds biggest interactive collection of America's Funniest Home Videos. Though there is no Bob Sagat lurking about making cornball jokes, it is true that many of YouTube's biggest smashes were of this low-fi, pratfall variety: Cats playing piano, skateboarders flying off of ramps, Helen Keller falling of the stage in an amateur production of The Miracle Worker (my personal favorite). The more asinine the better, America's appetite for the silly knew no limits. And, given YouTube's five-minute video time limit, such easily digestible folderol made sense.

While these videos are without question a popular dimension of YouTube's appeal, the power of the website resides elsewhere. In the political arena gaffes by candidates are inevitable. Only in the aughts however could a gaffe be recorded once and then easily accessed by millions of users over and over and over again. (And linked to on Facebook pages and blogged about and twittered and....) Those campaigns not hip to this sea change often found themselves embarrassed and recoiling, like incumbent Virginia Senatorial candidate George Allen who, caught on tape in 2006 using the racial slur "macaca" at a rally, was later forced to apologize for the slip. Yeah, he lost. Many other such political moments got the YouTube treatment, changing the democratic process in America forever.

Creative entrepreneurs have also taken advantage of the site, in some cases transforming their YouTube videos into full-blown careers. Performer Liam Sullivan went from unknown to comedic sensation when he posted his now classic "Shoes" music video on YouTube in 2006. When Philadelphia videographer James Rolfe began comically reviewing the bottom-of-the-barrel video games of his youth, the persona of "The Angry Video Game Nerd" was born. Rolfe even had a cool theme song. Before long he was hired by gametrailers.com to be an exclusive feature of the site. Jeffery Self and Cole Escola were two unemployed 20-something friends just bored enough one day to start posting irreverent YouTube clips under the moniker the VGL Gay Boys. After a video about gay marriage in California went viral their popularity skyrocketed. Hollywood came a-knocking and before long the duo had their own TV show on Logo television, a gay Rowan and Martin for the internet age. The VGL Gays Boys, like Liam Sullivan and the Angry Video Game Nerd, are but a few examples of the awesome opportunities granted anyone with a computer and imagination in the 21st Century. The world of YouTube is littered with such success stories.

YouTube created its own universe of memes. Reaction videos to 2 Girls, 1 Cup being a paradigmatic example, much of YouTube became a matter of call and response in the aughts; a single video inspiring a slew of responses, remixes and parodies. Yes it was funny when we heard the audio tape of Christian Bale excoriating a crew member on the Terminator set, a verbal parade of purple profanity and mean-spirited sarcasm to make David Mamet envious. It was even funnier, however, when the clip was overlaid onto the viral sensation "David at the Dentist," the whole becoming so much more than the sum of its parts. Even narcotic use was effected by the site; the (legal) psychtropic Salvia came to be known as the "YouTube drug," the substances five-minute high perfect for recording and uploading for all the world to see. Video trends took on a life of their own. Beyonce's Single Ladies dance is almost better known because of its myriad parodies than for the original video itself. Yes, the aughts were a decade when pop culture could be endlessly rejiggered to one's own taste. After Chris Cocker gained national attention for screaming "Leave Britney Alone!" into his computer screen it was hours, not days, before parodies started to proliferate YouTube. Even celebrities like Seth Green got into the act with his own spoof of Cocker's teary-eyed missive, acutely aware that going viral is the way to stay relevant in 21st Century media.

The amount of content on YouTube now is staggering. Getting ever closer to the fantasy of watching whatever you want to, whenever you want to, and for free, YouTube has changed media consumption forever. Not one to let a major internet hub fall into other hands, Internet giant Google purchased YouTube in 2006 for over a billion dollars, eventually discontinuing their own YouTube-esque service "Google Video." With camera phones now offering instant YouTube uploading there will be no limits to peoples ability to document and share their lives with the world. Hell, we're there now. YouTube was the aughts' most perspicuous example of the paradigm shift toward user-driven content in mass media. The question is whether at the end of the next decade there will be any big-media left whatsoever, or will YouTube be all; the whole of media completely decentralized and fragmented yet located and uploaded onto one website? It's possible.

You AUGHT to remember.

#15 - Blogs

It was the decade when...

Everyone was an opinion columnist.


Blog
(noun)
1. A website which is frequently updated in the form of "posts." The content can be anything from political analysis, to celebrity gossip, to astrophysics, to film criticism, to food recipes, to personal diary. See also; live journal. Short for WEBLOG.

2. What you are reading right now.

3. A great way to get a movie deal.

(verb)

1. The act of blogging. [see below]


Blogger
(noun)
1. A solipsistic person who, eager to share his random musing on any asinine topic that interest him, decides to find a space on the Internet where he is able to empty his wasted intellectual energies on self-satisfying, banal observations about his daily life.

2. A frustrated journalist who, requiring the low entrance start-up of the Internet, uses a blog to begin an outside-the-normal-mechanisms-of-journalistic-approval news source.

3. One of the few category's that Perez Hilton and Richard Posner have in common.


Blogging
(Verb)

1. The act of writing pages and pages of text to be posted for universal publication on the world wide web, only to be read by you and your mother.

Bloggish
(adj)
Blog-like in content i.e. a brief opinionated, unjustified statement that is uttered with total certainty or an over-long description of a total banal experience.


Blogosphere
(noun)
1. The Interconnected network of blogs on the Internet which, together, act as an echo chamber for various up-to-minute new stories, memes, trends, and gossip.

2. The world's biggest game of Telephone.

VLOG
(noun)
1. A video blog.

2. A way for people too lazy to actually write anything to nonetheless offer their unsolicited cultural analysis, or share their self-confessional daily diary, to anyone on earth who cares to watch and listen.

(verb)
1. The act of posting a video blog.


Götterdämmerblog
(noun)
1. The total decimation of old of old media by the rise of the blogosphere.

2.The replacement of hard-working, paid field reporters and newsroom journalists by unpaid, unemployed, self-described "pundits" and "reporters" working from their living room.

You AUGHT to remember.

#16 - Cell Phones

It was the decade when...

Land-line became a punchline.


GREAT MOMENTS IN CELL PHONE HISTORY

"Snake" on Nokia Cell-Phones

Remember your first cell phone? What brand was it? When did you get it? I think I know the answer. I have taken a very informal survey to determine when most people got their first cell phone (I know I could just look at sales statistics but, this is a lot more fun.) and, shockingly, the answer is almost uniformly consistent: 2001. It seems that the second year of our decade was the watershed moment when a cell-phone went from a luxury to a necessity. Almost overnight, to not have a cell phone was to be divorced from modern life. The pager, now frozen in time as an emblem of the 90's, went from being wildly popular to antiquated as the telegraph. Cell phones were not the future by 2001, they were now. And, if you're like me, your first phone was probably a small Nokia with a monochromatic screen, like the one shown above. These phones were everywhere. Decidedly primitive by today's standards, these were ultra-portable communication devices that were cheap enough to be adopted by people from coast to coast in an amazing shopping frenzy. Nokia quickly became the market leader (and still is). And what gave Nokia the edge? It had to be...Snake!

Though these days you can play the latest photo-realistic FPS or the entire 8-bit Nintendo catalog on your mobile, I contend that the most addictive game possible for a portable device was Nokia's classic upload of Snake. A snake, symbolized by a little dark line, consumes morsels of food, each morsel making his body grow that much longer. The snake once in motion cannot be stopped and it's up to the player, manipulating the snakes direction, to make sure he doesn't ever eat his own tail. I lost hours upon hours of time snaking around. (You can download the original Nokia game here.) Snake was the first clue that cell phones are going to be about a lot more than audio communication.

It was also with these rudimentary phones that the real number one feature of cell phones came into focus: texting. See, I have always loathed talking on the phone. I like to look people in the eye when I talk to them, preferably over an alcoholic beverage for conversational lubrication. I find phone conversations awkward to end and weighed down with too much idle chatter. And yet, communication whilst separated in space from another individual is a necessity. (How else are you going to know where to meet for drinks in the first place?) A text, a short direct written communication between two cell phones, solves all these problems. It's also obsessively fun. My mobile is really a text machine which I sometimes use it for phone services. I am not alone.


The Blackberry
The most forward-thinking of cell phones, the Blackberry-5000 series, with it's E-Mail capabilities and rudimentary web browsing, became the first popular "smartphone" in America in 2002. Quickly becoming an object as synonymous with businessmen as the briefcase, the Blackberry user - in a three button suit, checking his email as he dashes down the street - is an iconic persona of the decade. So addictive the device has been nicknamed "crackberry," the Blackberry was the first popular consumer gadget that foresaw the convergence of functionality as the future of the business. Not content to merely provide phone service, the blackberry wanted to do it all. And did.

The phones greatest advertisement was none other than it's unofficial pitchman President Barack Obama who throughout the campaign was often photographed checking his Email or making a call on the device. After a hard fought battle, the President got permission to keep his Blackberry (a custom made, one-of-a-kind, security cleared Blackberry no less), all but securing sales for the company for years to come.


The RAZR

Chicest of the cells, the RAZR was the first cell phone to double as fashion accessory. Released for a whopping $600 in 2004, the RAZR began life as a kind of high end luxury item for money-oblivious fashionistas. After the price was dramatically lowered by 2006, the phones cache had already been established. It sold like gangbusters. In retrospect, the RAZR represented the pinnacle of the cell phone as cell phone. With smartphones taking over the entire market in ever more rapacious succession, its now the end of the cellphone as we once knew it. (The phone itself being but one in a panoply of features on the newer smartphones.) The RAZR was the most stylish, most publicized, most media friendly cell phone ever released. At last, design had met utility, form had met function. An iconic object of the Aughts, the RAZR was the cell phone's most commanding cultural moment. In only three years after its release a little product by a fruit company would all but demolish its cultural dominance.

The iPhone




There is a before and then there is an after. There is before JFK was assassinated and there is after. There is before Alexander Graham Bell called Watson into his office and there is after. There is before the Emancipation Proclimation and there is after. Equally so, there is before the iPhone and there is after.

Upon release the iPhone was given the sobriquet of "Jesusphone" and not undeservedly. Here was, at long last, a gadget of our dreams. The title iPhone was actually something of a misnomer. Yes the iPhone was the best, most effortlessly usable, most feature rich cell-phone ever made but, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Nothing short of a mini-Mac, the iPhone was a fully realized web-browser, calendar, Email service, camera, iPod, GPS (in it's second model) and, eventually, 3rd-Party platform for a ever-growing sea of applications. The touch interface was both intuitive and revolutionary (and perfect); the click-wheel of the iPod might as well be tossed into the dustbin of tech history, next to punch cards and the abacus. It's original price point of $500 was the only aspect of the phone that slowed it from total world domination, the amount being just too cost-prohibitive for many, despite the myriad features. When the price was eventually lowered to $200 the excuses anyone once made in avoidance were dried up. The iPhone was the Jesusphone indeed, the second coming of mobile devices and the death knell for the first era of cell phone culture. Picking up an incoming call, while surfing the net (in full HTML glory), after reading your daily E-Mail and updating your calendar appointments, it's sobering to remember that just 6 years ago you were playing Snake on a small, peaked looking screen. That, my friend, is what the Aughts were all about.



You AUGHT to remember...

#18 - iPod

It was the decade when...

We all became pod people.


Imagine if you will dressing a mannequin up in the full regalia of the decade. Your task is to make the mannequin the emblematic representation of the era using only the language of clothing and accessories. Obviously, as this blog has demonstrated, there are lots of directions you could take this task. Is the mannequin a boy in skinny jeans or a girl in boho-chic skirt? Should it be early or late Aughts? Hipster or socialite? Uggs or Crocs? One accessory, however, is to be included without question. One item that, if excluded, would leave the mise-en-scene curiously lacking. Emerging from the pant pocket and rising up to the mannequin's ears are two unmissable strands of white plastic which expand out to form two bulbous tips at their end. They are ear buds, the universal symbol announcing that this mannequin is an owner of the consumer product of the Aughts, the iPod.

Here is a object that drives otherwise critically minded people into a hyperbolic frenzy; speaking in tongues and sonnets of devotion are not uncommon. Both Gadgetheads and technophobes ended up embracing the device, the former for the Pod's technical prowess and revolutionary design structure, the latter for its ridiculously easy-to-use interface and catchy television commercials featuring dancing silhouettes. When Marx wrote of commodity fetishism he must have had a vision of iPod, though Marx was perhaps too short-sighted: As Apple's now iconic MP3 player was marching onward and upward, conquering the world like some Napoleonic gadget, its devotees moved beyond fetishism, approaching, ever closer, devotion and then, finally, worship. iPod is the new opiate for the masses. It has no competitor. Pity the poor fool who shows his face in public with a Zune. Even Hester Prynee would snicker. The iPod rules. Swept up in the fervor, Newsweek journalist Stephen Levy wrote a 2006 book on the iPod's cultural impact. The title: The Perfect Thing. Don't be coy with us now Levy, tell us what you really think.

Before the product reached total cultural ubiquity, sporting the iPod's signature and near luminescent white ear buds - perhaps the best aesthetic idea in a product line replete with design brilliance - whilst strolling a busy avenue immediately gave you a cache of "with-it"-ness that garnered no small number of envious glances from those sad sacks still forced to go about their day in the bland humdrum of music-less existence. Now that everyone in America save the Pennsylvania Dutch own an iPod of their own the exclusivity of the object has waned; the iPod is less a demarcation of status and has become a modern necessity, which is what a "must-have" object turns into when, in fact, you actually must have it. Steve Jobs gave all our lives a soundtrack. Walkman who?

I don't need to tell you that the iPod changed the entire of financial model of the music business, or rather, decimated it; the iTunes Store leveling both Tower Records and Vigin Megastore outlets, leviathans of the industry both. I don't need to tell you that what began as cigarette pack-sized white box that held 1000-songs has evolved into an entire product line of astoundingly smaller and more colorful iterations that have developed the ability to play not only music, but movies and television programs as well. And I definitely don't need to tell you that only Apple, with the advent of the iPhone, could make a product that could eclipse the iPod in pure lustful consumer desire. (Of course the iPhone is an iPod too. Natch!)

Even I, attempting to snarkify the cultural impact of the iPod for your reading pleasure, can't help but get swept up by brilliance of the machine. Even its name is perfect, both unforgettably simple (four letters, two syllables with that fantastic plosive "P" and satisfyingly confident "D" framing the resonating vowel "awe," - it's just fun to say), and vaguely bio-futuristic, pod being a word most likely found, before the Aughts, in a dime science fiction novel or biology textbook. Chosen by the prototype's resemblance to The HAL 9000 ("Open the pod bay doors Hal") the iPod debut year of 2001 was not without some literary resonance. The future indeed, was here.

The iPod; it's both a noun and complete sentence. iPod, do you? (You do.)

You AUGHT to remember...

#21 - Twitter

It was the decade when...

Any thought worth sharing was 140 characters or less.



You AUGHT to remember...

#23 - Wikipedia

It was the decade when...

cheating at Trivial Pursuit was easy as a mouse click.

I shall not bore you with facts and statistics. I will not ladle you with internet history. I will avoid analyzing the various controversies that have arisen over the years. (If you are interested you can find that information here, here, and here.) I simply want to take the moment here to say, unequivocally and clearly, that Wikipedia is one of the greatest things to ever happen in the history of humanity. There I said it. That's all. I'm done.

Ok, so, you want some explanation. Why does Wikipedia deserve such over-the-top praise? What attributes make it such an indispensable part of modern life? For the answer I simply like to imagine showing the site to a scholar from another era; perhaps a banyan wearing student of philology or natural philosophy, reading a book in Latin by candlelight next to his brass cassegrain reflector telescope at the Cambridge library in the 18th century. In the dimly lit scene, cut from Barry Lyndon, I emerge from my time-machine phone booth, laptop in hand. Somehow finding a wifi connection o'er the vast distances of time, I put the computer before the powdered and primped young student and ask him to type in a subject, any subject, into the Wikipedia search box. Perhaps "Sir Isaac Newton" is his selection, or, "Thomas Aquinas," both of whom would be on the lads 18th Cetrury reading list. Maybe his search is more abstract and he seeks knowledge on topics like "math" or "God." Or perhaps bored of scholastic endeavors his query is less academic and he searches for "figgy pudding" and "copulation." It's probably what's really on his mind. Whatever the choice, he instantaneously receives an organized and clear informative essay about his subject. Should he be dissatisfied with the contents on the page, hyperlinks are available to him at the bottom, allowing the student to reference at a more in-depth level the subject he was curious about. He types and types, the computer can't be stumped. The jaw goes slack. I would venture to guess that in no time at all this man of learning would come to be calling me a deity. (Either that or a witch to be burned at the stake. I'd prefer the former.)

I like to think about this because, given how quickly we incorporate new technology into our daily lives we just as quickly take it for granted. It bears repeating that the world of our impressed Cambridge student, learning his Euclid by the flicker of candlelight, was not so long ago. How far we have come is a testimony to the inquisitive academic spirit that has motivated thinkers throughout out history since time immemorial. And the terminal point of all these efforts may just be Wikipedia. The site represents one of the grandest dreams of all mankind: the totality of all human knowledge converging on a single, accessible point, a nexus of human intelligence. And, unlike the library of Alexandria, it can't burn down. It's practically indestructible.

Unreliable you say? An encyclopedia with no academic standard to separate the wheat from the chaff? Of what use is that? A encyclopedia in which anyone, any uneducated bozo, can act as an editor for any entry? That sounds like a recipe for disaster. To those naysayers I ask, "Have you ever actually used Wikipedia? Have you ever been shocked or appalled by a glaring error?" Neither have I. Sure, there have been some embarrassing moments but, on the whole, study after study has shown the online resource to be as reliable as the Encyclopedia Britannica. And even so, few who use the site are unaware of its unreliable narrator; a healthy skepticism about the contents is adopted by most readers. Even if an article were total balderdash, the aggregation of other web sources linked on a Wikipedia page are reason alone to single the site out as an important destination in web 2.0.

Wikipedia can make for a fun party game (albeit of a decidedly nerdy sort). I call it "Six-Degrees-Of-Anything" (sorry Mr. Bacon). The rules: select two wildly disparate topics and see how many internal wikipedia links it takes you to get from one to the other. For instance, Hula-Hoop to the Defenestrations of Prague goes thusly: Hula Hoop-Belarus-History of the Soviet Union 1985-1981-Czechoslovakia-Prague-Defenestrations of Prague. If you can get there in less links, I owe you a tenner. (Seriously, anyone who sends me an Email doing this will win a $10 from the kitty here at YATR. Game on bitches!) This hyper-connectivity between seemingly isolated topics even inspired an off-Broadway show called The Wikipedia Plays (natch), a collection of short pieces based on one long link train within Wikipedia.

Unlike "legitimate" encyclopedias, the democratic nature of Wikipedia means that the entry about Spider-Man may be as thorough as the page devoted to Friedrich Nietzsche. Sophisticates and would-be arbiters of social import might balk but, I say, no harm, no foul. Yes, we should all be familiar with the theory of eternal recurrence but, it hardly hurts anyone to know that Peter Parker began his Spider career as a professional wrestler. Britannica's editors have to make those kind of editorial decisions lest their encyclopedia become, well, 3.1 million articles long (as the English "edition" of Wikipedia is). No such editing is needed on the information superhighway; bandwidth weighs a lot less than leather bound tomes. Online there is more than enough room for Kant and comics, Napoleonic Wars and Napoleonic Desserts, Captain Ahab and Captain Kirk. Wikipedia's catholicity of content is what makes the site so universally appealing. Not a day goes by when I don't use it, trying to cram another abstruse fact or two into my already over-stuffed cranium. Luckily, with Wikipedia there, I know if I forget I am mere keystokes away from remembering.

You AUGHT to remember.

#28 - Hyperlinks

It was the decade when...

If you liked it then you shoulda put a link in it.

In the Aughts, sentences weren't just sentences, cold flat words arranged into coherent ideas, no! That's dull. Now, embedded into the very fabric of language was a new kind of textual device, for use only on the Internet. Behold the Hyperlink.

Once a binary world of black on white, with the hyperlink words popped off the screen in tantalizing colors. Passively reading became an impossibility; hyperlinks beckoned your participation, drawing you ever closer to the moment of contact, like Sleeping Beauty towards the enchanted Spindle. Suddenly, any phrase could become pregnant with possibility. Like a linguistic Christmas cracker or syntactic piñata, the hyperlink fills a word or phrase with a hidden surprise, a jack in the box waiting to be sprung.

Beneath what we read on the Internet there is a labyrinthine network of information loci; the hyperlink cracks through the floor boards letting us begin to traverse the ever expanding maze of content that is the information superhighway. The hyperlink is a kind of gift from writer to reader, a guide map pointing the latter toward his next destination, helping him avoid the pitfalls that can come from cold searching through the entirety of the internet.

Why use the hyperlink? The reasons are legion. The hyperlink's versatility is its greatest feature. In its most boring form a hyperlink can be an unambiguous and straightforward way to direct a reader to another webpage on the internet. For example, see here. (Which is itself an example of such use. Meta.) But hyperlinks really gain purchase when their use is more subtle and the interaction with the reader is more nuanced. Factual statements asserted in a primary text can be justified and referenced with an appropriate hyperlink, a kind of footnote on steroids. Or, a piece of text can make little sense at all without reference to its link, the linked site's content re-contextualizing the original pages meaning. Thanks Timothy Berners-Lee.

Of course, hyperlinks are destroying the art of reading. They're everywhere and they are irresistible. You can't even read short passages online without a hyperlink invasion. Try to make it through an op-ed article in the New York Times Online Edition without being teased away numerous times before getting to the end. (Frank Rich's most recent column had 18 links.) Incessant linking is recalibrating how our minds process written information. What once was a vertical activity has turned lateral; one doesn't read down so much across. Tabbed browsing allows one to link away from one page and onto the next, leaving a digital trail of breadcrumbs strewn on your computer desktop. Extended argument and cohesive thought are no match for the new information overload supplied by the internet, a glut facilitated in no small part by the advent of the hyperlink. We may be reading more words than ever before, but we're finishing what we start less and less, the hyperlink always beckoning us to abandon our current paragraph and seek out more exciting pages elsewhere. If you made it this far without so much as a trip away on one the hyperlink passports I've supplied, I'd be impressed.

You AUGHT to remember...

#33 - 2 GIRLS, 1 CUP

It was the decade when...

Scat was not a jazz style.


I have not seen 2 Girls, 1 Cup. I have no intention of ever seeing 2 Girls, 1 Cup. I would recommend to anyone, if they haven't seen 2 Girls, 1 Cup, that they avoid doing so at all costs. 2 Girls, 1 Cup is, of course, the Marquis De Sade's favorite Internet video. A movie of such misogynistic degradation that even Leopold Sacher-Masoch would get nauseous watching it. A two minute dive into Caligula-worthy debauchery. I wont describe it's contents (a description is available here and here) as elaborating further would cause me to lose my lunch all over my laptop.

Extreme porn was, before the Internet, a hard-to-find commodity, an object of borderline legality that had to be sought out by a dedicated pervert; they don't put coprophilia magazines on deli newsstands everyday. But, thanks to the democratization of information dissemination (finding bestiality sex videos is as simple as searching for stock quotes or weather reports), imagery that in the past would have been seen by only a select adventurous and/or disturbed few have now been watched by cringing millions. Hungry Bitches (the official title of 2 Girls, 1 Cup) is without question one of the most watched pieces of pornography since Deep Throat. A uniquely 21st Century phenomenon, this inexcusable movie became a pop culture sensation in 2007. It may also spell the end of Western Civilization.

The appeal (if that's what you want to call it) is not just the video's disgusting contents. Making a gross-out video is remarkably easy. No, what makes 2 Girls, 1 Cup such a widespread "hit" is its pretense as pornography; the filmmaker's attempt to arouse is what shocks and titillates. The irony here is textbook. 2 Girls, 1 Cup's actual effect is (we hope) the opposite of its intent. The set-up is almost comic: the maudlin piano score, the beauty of the "Girls," the mysterious title with its intimation of ravenousness ("What ever could these 'bitches' be hungry for?) - the ambiance is decidedly romantic. And then...

Whether or not anyone has ever watched 2 Girls, 1 Cup for sexual gratification is a question I don't really want to know the answer to, like, do I have the Alzheimer's Gene, or, how many calories does a Grande Frappauccino have? I take some comfort in the fact that the vast, vast majority of Cup viewers have watched the video as either as test of wills or on a dare. A sad few didn't know what they were watching when they started. (An occupational hazard for voracious Internet surfers.) All these decent people, confronted with images as foul and debased as any as they will ever see thought it wise to record their own personal Ludovico treatments for posterity. The great legacy of 2 Girls, 1 Cup is the anthology of reaction videos, a voluminous record of disgust uploaded to YouTube and preserved for all time. A parade of faces in various grimaces of laughter, horror and nausea, watching these videos in rapid succession has a hilarious, hypnotic fascination. The consistency of the reactions, the uniform tempo of the squirming, the omnipresent piano serenade in the background- the reaction videos are more and more of a delight to watch with every new "Oh My GOD!" They became so popular that 2 Girls, 1 Cup's viral popularity can only be explained in reference to the desire people had to share their horror at watching it with the world. Why else would you sit through that? The 21st Century is the era where nothing is worth doing unless it's taped and uploaded. Privacy is so overrated.

By all means, should my reservations not dissuade you, watch the movie and post your own reaction video, but let it go at that. I don't recommend writing college essays about 2 Girls, 1 Cup, the professor is prone to miss your satirical brilliance.

Another piece of advice: don't think too long about 2 Girls, 1 Cup. You might find yourself asking unpleasant questions like: "Who are these 'actresses?'" " Why was the video really made?" "Why did the girls do it?" "It it fake? It's gotta be fake! It's fake. Please God, let it be fake." "What viral video could possibly top this?" That last question is the scariest of all. While I'd like to pretend that 2 Girls, 1 Cup will be a unique moment in the history of the Internet, I suspect that we will have more unfit-for-human-consumption videos uploaded our way in the near future. But for now we have, for your viewing pleasure, our de facto psychological record: Variance of disgust reactions in human subjects.

You AUGHT to remember.

Tosh.0
The Biggest Reaction Video
www.comedycentral.com
Web Redemption 2 Girls, 1 Cup Reaction Demi Moore Picture

#36 - Craigslist

It was the decade when...

One guy's list got so popular he made Santa jealous.

Website design has come a long way in the Aughts. From bland text based interfaces as aesthetically pleasing as the Wall Street Journal Stock Index to multimedia, flash enabled, graphically rich immersive "experiences," a well designed webpage is less a site one reads than a destination one visits. And yet, for all of Web 2.0's (as this era of the Internet is being coined) surplus of impressively designed webpages, there was one site that saw little need to adapt to the changing climate. One site that, despite being as visually bland as a box of generic cheerios, has established itself as one of the Internet's most popular destinations and a feature of social reality, that, like so much of the web, we could no longer imagine living without. It's a webpage that, if not single than helping handedly, destroyed the newspaper industry, gutting a financial model that could no longer sustain itself in a world where information exchange became both instantaneous and free. It's Craigslist! Your one stop find a job, buy a car, sell your toaster, audition a drummer, get laid, find a date, rent a prostitute shop for all your lifestyle needs. (Often in that order.) Craigslist is unpleasant, confusing, maddening, dull, mysterious, spam-filled and totally, absolutely necessary.

Craigslist didn't just find it's niche, it found everyones niche - on the site you could shop for just about anything that can be bought or sold (or given away for free) - from collapsible bicycles, to human labor, from a back alley blowjob, to a dinner companion for the opera - Craiglist was anything but limited. And unlike classified ads in print the call and response of posting and answering on Craigslist was near instantaneous. Craigslist was bland to be sure and almost wholly charmless but Goddamn if the site wasn't efficient at delivering the goods (both figuratively and literally).

Craigslist works because everyone agrees that it must. More local than eBay, less corporate than monster.com, and far blunter than EHarmony, Craigslist is the de facto location where everyone goes to engage in the marketplace. It's a cyber-bazaar; a wild, unruly yard sale-cum-newspaper classifieds section where any and everyone hawks their wares, prices always negotiable. Competition serves no one in this commercial model, the site only succeeds if there is one and only one place for everyone to meet and trade. Gradual migration to another similar site is a near impossibility. To the victor goes the spoils. Craigslist, being the first site of it's kind, capitalized on its initial dominance in online classifieds to become a nearly unstoppable force; by the time competitors tried to get a foothold Craigslist had staked its territory, dug out a moat, and erected battlements. King Craig rules.

Craigslist has inspired everything from off-Broadway shows, to Weird Al Yankovic parody songs, to psycho killers. Its stamp on American society is profound and unlikely to diminish any time soon. Pressure is always on for the site to sell-out, add ads, redesign its antiquated graphical interface. Something. But Craigslist plods on, conquering the the world a city at a time. All with only a staff of thirty and a founder who interacts with his sites users through the format of Haiku. Though he could sell his site for billions Craig is content with just millions; holding fast to his ideology of "direct democracy." As for myself? I just keep waiting to see if someone asks about me on Missed Connections.

#37 - Netflix/Hulu

It was the decade when...

Late return rental fees were a thing of the past.


Five Haikus about Netflix and Hulu

Anxiety comes
When I search through film listings.
You are what you queue.

Entertainment Starved?
TV is now a Buffet.
Stuff me with HULU!

Trips to Blockbuster
Are but a distant Mem'ry.
Why ever leave home?

And for the first time,
Satisfied with your service,
You sent it all back.

Screamin' 'bout streamin'.
Hulu may screw o'er artistes...
But it's fucking free!


You AUGHT to remember...

#38 - Perez Hilton

It was the decade when...

Hollywood's biggest power broker worked out of a coffee shop.

The original title of Perez Hilton's now infamous namesake blog was "PageSixSixSix." It was the last instance of wit that Perez would ever display. In just five years this foul-mouthed, flame-y haired, even flame-yer acting, gutter minded chimichanga has gone from an unemployed freelance writer with $60,000 dollars of debt to the worlds most famous gossip blogger, a six figure salary and multi-media fame. In retrospect the Miami-born, NYU educated, Mario Armando Lavandeira's rise to Hollywood fame was as unlikely as his blog (or one just like it) was inevitable. As such, and as horrifying as it is to contemplate, Perez Hilton is one of the Aughts most emblematic personalities. Oy.

Stylistically, somewhere between a Michael Musto missive and elementary school bathroom stall scrawl, Perez Hilton, the site and the man, have come to define what gossip is in the new cyber-media. Walter Winchell he ain't, Perez was the first to realize that in the era of the mouse click and hyperlink, volume always trumps quality. Best to have forty hastily organized posts a day than five brilliantly pithy, well written ones. Grammar is for losers, sentences are passe. In the Internet area, a picture (of Clay Aiken with drawn on ejaculate running down his mouth) says 1000 words, none of which would be pleasant to read. Hilton's editorial standard requires only that the posts be in English, and even then sometimes you wonder...

Perez may get millions of hits a day but, for most readers, the actual time spent on the site probably lasts about as long as an extended piss or short shit; the experience is always excremental. Perez knows (intuitively, from experience no doubt) that surfing the Internet has bulldozed our attention spans to somewhere between badger and opossum on the phylogenetic tree. We now want our celebrity news digestible in one long gulp, like a frat boy finishing a six pack. You'd throw up if you were to sip it. A brief visit down Hilton lane on your five minute office coffee break can function as an emergency infotainment debriefing. It's gossip redux. A digital Page Six, distilled to bullet points and dirty pictures. Drained of all editorializing, the site is a who-is-doing-who and who-is-pregnant-now memorandum of the most crude kind. The frequent updates keeps its readers hitting refresh like lab mice clicking their feed bar. Communication hasn't been rendered this sparse since the heyday of the pay-by-the-letter telegram.

Perez did much right in his quest to become the self-proclaimed "Queen of All Media." Unlike other low-brow gossip sites like DListed.com or Pinkisthenewblog.com (or even more legitimate Internet gossip sources like gawker.com and it's subsidiaries) Perez's site was as much about the blogger's own cult of celebrity as it was the actual A-D Listers and celebutantes he reported on. You would go to his site to learn about Brangelina drama or the latest Britney Spears disaster scene, but you couldn't escape the man himself. Anything but camera shy, this zaftig trash-talker worked overtime to make his personal persona (not just his blog) synonymous with celebrity in the 21st century. The efforts paid off. Soon, the New York Times was writing articles and old media could no longer ignore this new Hollywood game changer. His inferno-topped visage became a fixture of the LA nightlife scene; soon he was the one in Paparazzi photographs. TV Specials and red carpet gabfests were only going to be a matter of time.

With the new medium of blogging being defined and re-calibrated in real time, the journalistic standards that held sway for decades in print media were, if not useless, totally ignored. Was a gossip blog more like a gaggle of friends pick-a-littling at drinks on a Friday night or was it a newfangled periodical column in the vein of Liz Smith, Cindy Adams and the legendary Page Six? (Or was a blog more akin to a logorrheic nutjob shrieking on a soapbox in Hyde Park?) Perez Hilton assumed the casual, loose lipped informality of private conversation but got an audience as massive as any of the genre's old warhorses. Controversy inevitably followed.

While Michael Musto may snarkily (Michael Musto eats his corn flakes snarkily) and obliquely allude to a well-known closet case's infamous same-sex orgies, Perez will provide pictures and commentary. For Hilton, himself an out and proud gay man, the Hollywood closet was only a doorway to success; he has little interest in protecting any public figure's privacy should they choose to hide their sexual orientation. And Hollywood is afraid, very afraid.

Both Lance Bass and Neil Patrick Harris had little choice but to announce their homosexuality after being backed into a closet corner by the scruple-free blogger. Though "Who's gay in LA LA Land?" has long been a favorite party game of homos from here to the land of Oz (lots of gays there), when such casual speculation finds its way online, the finality of putting the trashy gab in writing (even of the non-print variety) brings to bear a new whole roster of ethical and journalistic issues. But, of course, Perez is not a journalist. He is not a reporter. He is not the employee of a media company. He is a guy with a laptop. In essence, that's all he is or needed to be. This is the 21st Century. Recently, after the feeding frenzy over Miss California's anti-gay response to Perez Hilton's Same-sex marriage question (He later called her a "dumb bitch.") while appearing on the Miss USA panel, Perez has positioned himself as a GLBT activist, even showing up on legitimate talk shows to debate same sex marriage. Not all gays are having it.

Who's really not having it are the paparazzi who risk life and limb daily to get that million (or 500, more usually) dollar shot of Nicole Ritchie eating a corn dog. They struggle and toil only to have their "work" exploited by Hilton, who, as easy as a right-click, appropriates the fruits of their labor, defiles it with his magic markers, and then posts the image for all to see, making boffo bucks all the while. Enter the lawsuits. While it's hard to get worked up about injustices against the pawn-scum that are celebrity paparazzi, what was at stake in the case against Hilton was nothing less than the copyright status of images in the brave new world that is the Internet. In this instance the matter was settled out of court, leaving the precedent still nebulous; further lawsuits, whether against Hilton or other Internet picture poachers is all but inevitable.

As a fabulized, slenderized Hilton stands atop his mini-Empire of over-inflated importance, he must wonder, "How long can this last?" As self-made as any classic entrepreneur in the mythopoeia of the American Dream, Perez Hilton was neither the most original nor talented neophyte bloggerhead to reach for success, he was simply the one who got there first and knew what to do with it when he arrived. He is at once unique and emblematic. Is Perez Hilton really the Queen of all Media? In the age of the internet, you are what you say you are. So, Long Live the Queen.

You AUGHT to remember...

#45 - MySpace

It was the decade when...

A place for friends became a cathouse for skanks.

The scene: A Saloon in Beverly Hills, California.

We see Tom, an attractive man around 34, walk into the saloon. He is wearing a tight white shirt. He looks disheveled. He walks over to the bar and sits down. The bar tender (played by Sam Elliot) goes over to him.

Bartender: Well, hello there son. From the looks of you, I reckon you could use a drink. Something a little stronger that a sarsaparilla perhaps?

Tom: Give me a double of whatever your strongest whiskey is.

Bartender: One of those days, is it? The clouds ain't got no silver lining? I've been there son. Here ya are. (He hands him the drink) Now, I ain't no head shrinker, but, care to share your troubles?

Tom: It's all over. You know the expression the higher the climb the harder the fall?

Bartender: I 'spose I've heard that once or twice.

Tom: Well, I am living proof of it right here. The sword of Damocles has fallen. You, sir are looking at the man who invented the #1 social networking site on the Internet.

Bartender: Whoa...you're the founder of Fa..

Tom: No! You do not say that word in my presence. When I hear that word I seizure. So, no, Not THAT social networking site...the (cough) former #1 social networking site on the Internet.

Bartender: Ah, Twitter! I love to tweet.

Tom: NO! I'm talking about the MySpace! The site that was once poised to rule the Internet and by extension, the whole world. And I was everyone's first friend Tom. That was me.

Bartender: Ah, MySpace. I remember that. I used to have a profile on there. Jeez, I haven't been on MySpace in years.

Tom: Yeah, you and everyone else. I tell ya man, we were once the most popular website in the America. I couldn't get enough press! We were changing the way the world works. People were getting famous from our website alone.

Bartender: Like that Tequila lady. She's mighty purdy.

Tom: And Dane Cook went from nobody to the top comic in America thanks to our site, and he's not even funny! The music industry had been upended; new bands could advertise themselves and get famous with the click of a button. And getting laid became as easy as logging on and getting off.

Bartender: It's true. I met a fine hussy or two off of MySpace.

Tom: It was beautiful. This was supposed to be my decade. I went on Friendster in 2002, saw that I could rip it off and BAM!, we went from four million subscribers in December of 2004 to 100 Million by the end of 2006. Friendster was left in the dust. I was a king.

Bartender: As my Grandpappy used to say, "Heavy is the head that is inflated with it's own bullshit."

Tom: I don't think that's the right express...nevermind. You know when I thought we had won? Really triumphed? July 2005. Rupert Murdoch bought us for $580 Million. Half a Billion Dollars! MURDOCH! The kingpin of old media. The Aussie Oligarch. I thought, within a few years, we'd own Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Steve Jobs would be licking my boot. I would rename "the Internet" "MySpace-Land." My goal: every human on planet earth would be my friend. And it was all coming true!

Bartender: Son, sounds like you had some delusions of grandeur. As my Momma used to tell me, "Pride goeth before you totally make of an ass of yourself." What went wrong do you think?

Tom: Everything! I mean, everything. I wanted to let people customize their own pages. Make them look however they wanted. Good idea, right? What ends up happening? You can't read half of the member profiles, the pages are so cluttered and ugly. MySpace began to have the the visual temperament of the Speed Racer movie or PaperRad art collective. And then...the trash. So much trash came out of the woodwork. I didn't know the world had so many trashy people in it...and I live in LA! It got so you were more likely to receive a friend request from a Ukrainian prostitute than anyone you actually knew. Bad things started to happen too. A English girl advertises a party at her parents house on MySpace...next thing you know the home is destroyed, there is ten of thousands of pounds of damage and we are the fall guys in the British Press. Our music site started to get bad reviews, but with competitors like ITUNES and Pandora it was hard to keep up. Our PR went from bad to worse. Disturbed teens started to blog on MySpace about their love of guns or death obsessions right before they went out and shot someone. That didn't win any points for us. The whole site started to feel like this saloon: dark, dirty, cluttered, redolent of whisky, with a tranny-hooker in the corner. And there was this other website called Face...well, a competitor who through some stroke of luck just took off.

Bartender: Son, that's some hard knocks. Another Whiskey?

Tom: A double. (Bartender gives him the drink. Tom downs it.) Now experts are saying that Murdoch was a fool to buy us, can you believe that! At the time we thought we were worth 4 to 5 Billion- we were underselling! Reports have Newscorp losing 100 Million due to loss of traffic. We are about to lay off 420 employees, 30% of our workforce. No one talks about us anymore. I don't...know...what I'm...going to do!! (Break downs in sobs.)

Bartender: Now, now son! Don't let all that bring you down. As my Pa always said to me, "When life gives ya lemons, throw em at the nearest asshole who crosses ya."

Tom: What? What does that mean? Nevermind. I gotta go home. I'm too depressed. I'll just go for a swim in my pool of Evian water and then make love to the three Penthouse triplets currently bathing in my whirlpool spa.

Bartender: All right then son, it's been a pleasure a talking to ya. I'd like to keep in touch.

Tom: That'd be nice. It's been nice to talk to someone.

Bartender: Great. I'll Facebook you tonight.

(Tom falls to the ground in convulsions. End of Scene.)

You AUGHT to remember...