theintrinsicperspective.com
Submission statement:
Erik Hoel argues that 2012 was a cultural inflection point. Just as 1968 signalled the peak of the 1960s cultural revolution that would set the stage for the next few decades of social change, 2012 represents the beginning of the (spoiler) smartphone era and a new round of social change.
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Notes -
To add my 2c, my experience with this was that I served an LDS mission from 2010-2012, which in a sense is like being cryogenically frozen (culturally) for 2 years. If anyone doesn't know, briefly - you don't (at least, you're not supposed to...) watch movies, listen to popular music, play video games, at the time browse the internet (missionaries now are permitted Facebook for contacting and proselyting, which is a whole thing but big no-no back then.). We had a cellphone but this was a new thing for missionaries and it had only the most rudimentary calling ability. I remember we gained the ability to "text" about halfway through which was very exciting.
Prior to my mission I enjoyed surfing the internet, I remember spending a lot of time on sites like Failblog, and many of the other sites under that umbrella. Facebook was still somewhat cool and I spent time on there, but that was a young people thing. I remember near the end of my mission one of the older members of a congregation I was in had an iPhone 4S, which had this thing on it called "Siri" which was a real life virtual assistant! But before my mission, the only people who had iPhones were like the cool tech bros I was friends with, so that felt like a bit of a shift.
Another thing was getting home and my family members telling me about the song "Party Rock Anthem" and "Shuffling", some one-hit wonder named Gotye, and Kony 2012. The sense I got was that a lot of stuff that maybe used to be more limited to more Online people (as it were in the late 2000s), was now breaching "containment" of sorts and virality was extending more to the normies. I don't know if that's an accurate read, perhaps I wasn't aware enough pre-2009 to see that it was always there in that way, but I think it was a little different. I remember Pants on the Ground and Antoine Dodson ("hide yo kids"), but that was 2010! I thought it was earlier. Is there an online meme "inflection point" as far as normie virality goes, and when was it?
Your read sounds fairly accurate to me, actually, as someone who did not go on a Mormon mission and disconnect between 2010 and 2012. That period sounds about right for when the "online" world started colliding more frequently with the "real" world.
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