I recently listened to an episode of Radiolab, "Time Is Honey." The exact topic of the episode (bees and the Internet) is not really relevant to the point I am going to make here, what is relevant is that co-host Latif Nasser is trying to find an example of an overloaded website to use in a story he's telling the other co-host, Lulu Miller, like when too many people all get on the same site at one time and that overloads it and no one can access it, or at least, it loads at an agonizing crawl.
And Lulu Miller doesn't know what the Hamster Dance is!
Now, I don't expect everyone to know what the Hamster Dance is. I'm sure my parents don't; I'm sure some younger Gen Xers don't know what it is either. On the other end of the spectrum, I certainly wouldn't expect my Gen Z students to know it, or even younger Millennials. The Interner has gone on to feature much more interesting things.
But surely if you are a Millennial of a certain age, you must know what the Hamster Dance is. I don't know exactly when Lulu Miller was born, but from Wikipedia, I can tell she was in college in 2005, as was I, so she can't be too far off my own age. Are there really people born c. 1985 who don't know what the Hamster Dance is, who never saw it?
This isn't a serious criticism, by the way. I'm sure there are lots of people who didn't know the Hamster Dance. But it kind of boggles my mind to imagine them. I'm sure things like this happen all the time, I'm sure there are things other people perceive as ubiquitous in their own era that some people never actually experienced. I wouldn't say the Hamster Dance is a generation-defining experience (I'm sure Lulu Miller does remember exactly where she was on 9/11)... but it is emblematic of the old weird Internet that used to exist and has largely passed, and that I do feel like was a generation-defining experience.
I hope at least Lulu Miller knows Trogdor.
No comments:
Post a Comment