The Top 10 Pop Culture Goliaths of the Noughties: Part One

Most tabloid newspapers are already posting their ‘Top 10 _____ of the Decade’ filler articles, and I’m a reflective kind of gal. So I’m going to throw my hat in the ring.

Here it is:

That’s right Ladies and Gents, it’s the countdown of the decade- and the only one you’ll want to read for the rest of this year! I almost guarentee it.

This countdown comes with a special challenge: I’m going to personally expose my Gen-Y ass to all and sundry and apply a limitation: each nomination can only be illustrated with what can be found in my personal computer’s My Documents folder! So-long, Google Image Search, we don’t need you! And without further ado, let’s begin.

PART ONE…

10.) Macros, Memes, and Lolcats: 2005-2009

Groupthink manifests in the Noughties in the meme, and reveals the desires, aspirations and lofty ambitions of the collective human psyche: Here be KITTNZ, and THEY IZ IN UR NOUN VERBING YOUR NOUN, but probably, they’re just watching you fap.

Thanks to the nefarious online forum 4chan, lolcats entered the pop culture realm and still hasn’t left it, leaving an indelible mark and spurning such dedicated weblogs such as icanhascheezburger.com. They’ve become pretty passe and are no longer deemed funny according to the fun police, and macro-able memes are experiencing a shorter and shorter half-life, as the disasterous Kanye meme of 2009 readily proved.

 

 

 

meet Bodie (middle) and Katie (right), alumni of Big Brother Australia seasons 8 and 7 respectively.

9.) Reality Television

The Noughties were definitely the decade of reality tv shows. The basest desires of the viewer could find cheap nourishment here as ratings gold was struck. At first, it seemed TV networks were delving into potentially intelligent social experiments, or dabbling in truly democratic television: but then, it simply became an overdose of the cheap, the terrible and the tacky, and revealed that deep down inside, we are just nasty nasty people (US series The Swan is a serial offender in my eyes).

Reality TV sometimes nurtured the Lord of the Flies Island Boy inside all of us: in many series, our vote could determine the fate of who will stay and who will go: and if we had the conch, we’d be kicking ass in Survivor or The Amazing Race. Big Brother appealed to the darker voyeur in all of us, causing controversies worldwide in it’s various international incarnations. George Orwell rolled over in his grave a few more times in the Noughties.

Other shows were simply a replacement for the budget funniest home video and variety shows more popular in televised days of yore:  So You Think You Can Dance, I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!, X Factor, and the numerous international incarnations of the popular Idol series gave us occasional superstars and a whole lotta wannabes.

Reality TV encapsulates everything that was wrong, and everything that was so, so right about the Noughties.

This is for you, Genie:

YES.

That’s the end of part one folks! Stay tuned for the next installment of THE TOP 10 POP CULTURE GOLIATHS OF THE NOUGHTIES…

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Tags: adam lambert, big brother, countdown, disaster boy, disaster girl, lolcats, macros, meme, naughties, noughties, pop culture, reality tv, top ten, top ten of the decade

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