The telegraph, the first invention of instant long-distance travel, created a new idea of "now." When Lincoln received telegraphs from Gettysburg, it required a new way of thinking to grasp that General Pickett had begun his march "now", at the exact same time Lincoln was reading the telegraph in Washington. Time and space, funny enough, were intertwined in the brain. The farther away something was occuring, the further away you were from learning about it. But with the telegraph (and the telephone and radio and television and the internet), time became universal. Any college grad will (hopefully) be able to tell you that time zones came about so the railroad companies could have an agreed upon schedule. But it was the telegraph which even made the concept of time zones possible. The world was suddenly a lot busier.
This lead to a very sudden acceleration of nearly all aspects of culture. With telegraph cables came the instant conversation between stock exchanges in New York, London, and Tokyo, all feeding and responding to each other in real time. Boom and bust periods became world wide phenomenons; the failure of banks in Europe meant the falling of stocks in New York. War became a far more intriguing battle of intelligence. While spies were always a part of warfare, a solid telegraph system (even Napoleon's visual telegraphs) could foretell the movement of troops miles (and days) away. Media grew as the news did; newspapers had something new to report every day, merely because the world never sleeps. Be they a broker, spy, or journalist, one could send the most important messages to their target longitudinal measures away, and this changed culture from coasting to full-on flooring the proverbial pedal.
Fashions, fads, and "memes" coalesced into a completely new concept: popular culture. Suddenly, what was popular in New York could be popular in Chicago and Los Angeles. It's amazing to think what could not have existed without the telegraph. Sports would have moved at a glacial pace, with scores and statistics moving with the Postal Service. Clothing and fashion would remain local, inspired not by runways and models but by local celebrities and religious customs. Of course, the telegraph was just the first step in telecommunications.
The internet, unique in its democratic distribution and catholic coverage, took local scenes and magnified them into worldwide phenomenons. The new school of "memes", far removed from Richard Dawkin's concept of ideas acting like genes or even viruses, made in-jokes known within weeks, days, or hours. Consider the image macro. Macros, such as "lolcats", were in a unique spectrum of communication, changing common sentiments on image boards (such as the now infamous 4chan) into simply posted and humorous jokes. Most people who have seen lolcats now have little idea of their original purpose. Macros have expanded into a culture all their own, with their own language, rules, and iconography. But with a quick rise often comes a sudden fall.
The term "internet craze" now seems terribly outdated, as the internet is no longer its own culture, a niche market. The internet is now a mirror of the culture at large in the same way all popular culture exists. Fame that used to last years now last months, if that, before the spinwheel of the internet replaces it with something else. This is due, in part, to the limit of exposure before something becomes overexposed or "overplayed", a concept that's been around as long as FM radio. "Cool" is often a quality possessed very briefly, and even more brief for those made cool out of "irony", or the concept of the cultural artifact deemed so critically bad, it loops back around to being good. We enjoy these things for the same reason we enjoy parodies.
Rebecca Black is a good and fairly recent example of this. Even now, a mere 6 months after her video "Friday" has been seen by everyone with a modem, she seems outdated, overplayed. However, the video succeeded because it was mundane, superficial, and completely readable. The aim of Black, or at least her producer the ARK Music Factory, is so obvious, so inauthentically executed, it was "doomed to fame", as it were. The language of the internet requires the kind of analysis that made this video an instant hit. The internet requires a constant questioning of motives and authenticity. Even now, unless you know me personally (or perhaps especially if you know me personally), you have already made a judgment on whether this website is verifiable or trustworthy. I'm not exactly reporting the news, or pretending I have some scholarly credit to my name, but you know what to look for. It's a Blogger page, which means he doesn't have the means or know-how to set up his own URL. It's simply designed, meaning he's either a hipster or wishing Tumblr provided more room for text. No ads? Why is he even running this site?
We are a generation of skeptics. Our first real cultural moment, after all, was our President changing his mind about who he had sexual relations with. Indeed, nearly every major question our generation has been asked has had to do with authenticity and motives. Why do they hate us? Why did we invade Iraq? Why is Paris Hilton famous? These are questions which continue to be debated to this day (though I suppose we could replace Paris Hilton with Kim Kardashian). Every cultural craze we have come to face has been centered on the question of authenticity. Reality shows are contrived, everyone knows it, but the mere idea of reality playing out on television brings tens of millions of viewers. But are these people on TV characters or actual people? Shows like The Hills, which hired actors to play reality TV subjects, and The Office, which used the imagery of reality TV but made no bones about its fictional nature, are built on this blend of realism and fantasy. While this is not a new debate for a generation to answer, the internet has propelled this question into our daily lives: How can we distinguish between fact and fiction when we can manufacture either?
The rise of 9/11 conspiracy theories (or even moon landing conspiracy theories, which existed prior to the internet but only took off after a 2001 FOX special) can be considered part of this. It's hard to imagine something so massive and so visible being questioned in an era before Photoshop. Indeed, Photoshop has changed our perception of nearly everything we see online. While photograph manipulation existed as long as photographs have, Photoshop made even the most spectacular ideas capable of presenting themselves in a realistic context.
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