Internet Nostalgia
Introducing the Internet Nostalgia Series
Bringing back the stories you’d forgotten to forget about
Today I am delighted to introduce a new series I’m planning to run on Fridays until… well, until it seems like it’s time to stop, I guess. It is called Internet Nostalgia, and it looks back at stories that captured the imagination and attention of the internet for a fleeting moment and then vanished as everyone moved on to something else. The world of the internet moves so quickly that things that happened five years ago might as well be black-and-white newsreel footage at this point. This series looks back at those phenomena and what they told us about the internet and ourselves. If you have a suggested topic, email me at williamfleitch@yahoo.com.
We begin with the saga of Justine Sacco and her infamous “Africa AIDS” tweet.
Date: December 20, 2013
The story: As later documented in Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Justine Sacco, a senior director of corporate communications at IAC, was about to board a flight from New York City to South Africa when she sent this tweet, the final in a series of jokey missives about the banality of air travel:
