Cultural Trends 2009

Unless you spent 2008 under a rock (or wandering around Second Life) some of the biggest cultural trends actually had very little to do with mainstream media — television, film, music and the like. While it’s been simmering for quite some time, the Internet (or, as Senator Stevens famously observed “a series of tubes”) came to define the cultural trends of 2008.

LOLcatz, Threadless, The Gawker meltdown, Mommy bloggers, and that little thing called, say, the presidential election all transpired in real time. Television? All CNN could offer us on election night was an awkward holographic image of a C-list correspondent. Heck, even Saturday Night Live began its comeback (pre Sarah Palin) with Andy Samberg video shorts which screamed their way around the Web.

So, it should come as little surprise that our latest presentation on cultural trends arrives electronically, through the magic of something called The Internet.