Transcript

8.13.26 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye and to
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Speaker 1: day I will be reading from a special edition of
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Speaker 1: Smithsonian Magazine America at two fifty the Revolutionary Spark. As
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Speaker 1: a reminder, Radio I is a reading service intended for
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Speaker 1: people who are blind or have other disabilities that make
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Speaker 1: it difficult to read printed material. Please join me now
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Speaker 1: for the first article titled Every Generation of Teenagers redefines
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Speaker 1: pop culture through its favorite music, fads, movies, and trends.
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Speaker 1: When new government policies allowed kids more time to grow up,
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Speaker 1: the teenager was born, and every decade or so they've
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Speaker 1: changed the ways they entertained themselves and everyone else by
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Speaker 1: April White. The United States invented the teenager in the
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Speaker 1: mid twentieth century, and then teenagers reinvented the nation repeatedly.
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Speaker 1: The creation of a new demographic was an accident. Really.
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Speaker 1: New deal policies moved teens from the workplace the classroom.
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Speaker 1: A booming post World War II economy gave them disposable income.
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Speaker 1: The rise of the automobile offered unprecedented freedom. Soon companies
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Speaker 1: began to see teenagers as customers. Often high schools five
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Speaker 1: days a week, teens formed their own communities, proving grounds
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Speaker 1: for generation defining media, fashion, and communications trends. Those obsessions
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Speaker 1: reshaped the social landscape, from the birth of rock and
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Speaker 1: roll to the rise of emojis. In each era, teens
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Speaker 1: identified themselves by what they watched, listened to and read,
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Speaker 1: where they hung out, and how they talked to one another.
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Speaker 1: Here's a sampling of their favourites. The Silent Generation. Teens
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Speaker 1: in the nineteen forties and fifties rebel without a cause.
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Speaker 1: The James Dean Coming of Age classic played into adult
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Speaker 1: sphere of delinquents, and it turned an undergarment, the T shirt,
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Speaker 1: into a fashion statement when paired with genes disc jockeys.
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Speaker 1: Teens wanted to listen to something different from their parents,
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Speaker 1: anointed radio djays such as rock and roll hypeman Dick
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Speaker 1: Clark and rap forerunner Jocko Henderson as their taste makers.
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Speaker 1: Drive in restaurants, car centric dining chains think A and W,
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Speaker 1: Sonic and Bob's Big Boy became public squares, pen pals
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Speaker 1: inspired to act as international peace makers. Post war era
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Speaker 1: teens sought to correspond with their overseas peers transistor radios.
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Speaker 1: These low cost devices gave control of the dial to
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Speaker 1: teenagers who turned listening to music into a hobby. Boomers
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Speaker 1: teens in the nineteen sixties and seventies. Beach Party films,
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Speaker 1: Beach Party and similar movies were heavy on fun, light
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Speaker 1: on moral lessons, and almost entirely devoid of adults. Music
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Speaker 1: festivals Woodstock is the most famous of the era's rock festivals,
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Speaker 1: which allowed teens to connect with artists and like minded fans.
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Speaker 1: A countercultural movement flourished going out. Teens told their parents
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Speaker 1: and polsters that didn't matter where they were going, as
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Speaker 1: long as they were out of the house, often just
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Speaker 1: driving around. Princess telephones, the utilitarian black rotary telephone, got
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Speaker 1: an upgrade to meet the demands of the teen market.
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Speaker 1: At and T's Princess Model, which debuted in nineteen fifty
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Speaker 1: nine and a rainbow of colors, was the first phone
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Speaker 1: series to be an interior design choice. Teen Crush magazines,
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Speaker 1: Tiger Beat, and other teeny bopper titles featured photos of
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Speaker 1: hunky stars and casually intimate details about teen heartthrobs, making
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Speaker 1: them a precursor to today's voracious celebrity gossip culture. Gen
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Speaker 1: X teens in the nineteen eighties and early nineties slacker films.
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Speaker 1: In response to the striving world of boomers, these teens
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Speaker 1: turned to the cynical directionless stereotype immortalized in movies like
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Speaker 1: Slacker Clerks, singles, and reality bites. Portable music music became
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Speaker 1: personal for Gen xers, who could broadcast beats from their
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Speaker 1: boon box or listen privately anywhere on a walkman, first
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Speaker 1: a portable cassette player, and then a portable CD player.
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Speaker 1: The mall most Gen X teenagers held after school or
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Speaker 1: summer jobs. The last cohort for which that was true,
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Speaker 1: which met malls, were where many both worked and played.
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Speaker 1: Motorola pagers beepers, first used by doctors, made savvy teens
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Speaker 1: of the early nineties the first always connected generation. MTV
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Speaker 1: the network influenced the esthetic of eighties teendom with video
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Speaker 1: jockeys in bright colors, fast paced editing, and its unrivaled
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Speaker 1: ability to anoint the next big artist Millennials teens in
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Speaker 1: the late nineteen nineties and two thousands smart teen flicks
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Speaker 1: tapping into teen's self deprecating sense of humor. Hollywood produced
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Speaker 1: inexpensive satires like Rushmore, Legally Blonde, and Mean Girls. Hits
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Speaker 1: in theaters and at the local blockbuster. Napster teenagers started
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Speaker 1: and fueled the short lived and controversial peer to peer
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Speaker 1: music sharing service that pushed the record industry into the
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Speaker 1: online era. Skate parks cities erected structures in parks and
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Speaker 1: public areas to keep skateboarders off the streets, but their
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Speaker 1: style couldn't be contained. Even those who never attempted to
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Speaker 1: ali adopted their loose fitting fashion. MySpace. Teens flocked to
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Speaker 1: this early social media site where they could shape their
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Speaker 1: own identities, customizing pages with music, photos and designs to
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Speaker 1: connect with friends. Y a literature book series about teens,
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Speaker 1: think Twilight, The Hunger Games, Gossip Girl, Sword in popularity
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Speaker 1: and received the Hollywood treatment, becoming pop culture for all ages.
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Speaker 1: Zoomers teens in the twenty tens and twenty twenties. Animation
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Speaker 1: animated movies, including classics like Shrek and twenty twenties breakouts
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Speaker 1: like K Pop Demon Hunters, continue to attract teens. According
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Speaker 1: to a UCLA study, nearly half of gen Z watchers
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Speaker 1: prefer them to live action options mood music. Today's teens
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Speaker 1: are ignoring the genre distinctions of past generations. They rely
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Speaker 1: on algorithmic streaming services to create playlists that fit a
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Speaker 1: mood or an activity. TikTok. More than half of zoomers,
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Speaker 1: many of whom were teenagers during the pandemic, are on
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Speaker 1: TikTok every day. Fast evolving trends have helped popularize the
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Speaker 1: short form video platform, now a widespread source of news, comedy,
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Speaker 1: and advice. Emojis. These teens of the first native emoji speakers,
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Speaker 1: broadening the language's vocabulary, customizing characters, and making them common
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Speaker 1: in all kinds of conversations, from the classroom to the
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Speaker 1: dating scene to the workplace. Nostalgia TV streaming video services
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Speaker 1: now provide tens of thousands of television options available on demand,
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Speaker 1: a frequent choice for today's adolescent audience. The hits of
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Speaker 1: their parents' generation like Friends, Er and The West Wing
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Speaker 1: and with this article did you know Elders carry Big Sticks?
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Speaker 1: Despite the description, the Silent Generation was very vocal and
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Speaker 1: highly influential, fueling monumental social shifts. Well known activists of
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Speaker 1: the Silent Generation include Martin Luther King Junior, Gloria Maurice Steinhem,
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Speaker 1: Dolores Huerta, John Lewis, and Angela Davis. About seventy one
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Speaker 1: percent of boomers and members of the Silent generation age
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Speaker 1: sixty five plus voted in the twenty twenty five presidential election,
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Speaker 1: more than younger generations. Next, how the hashtag became the
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Speaker 1: way to instantly invite literally everyone into the conversation. In
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Speaker 1: the nascent days of Twitter, users wanted a quick way
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Speaker 1: to cluster posts about a single subject. Someone suggested using
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Speaker 1: a pound sign and hashtag. The rest is history by
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Speaker 1: Clive Thompson. At first, there wasn't much to it. In
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Speaker 1: the summer of two thousand and seven, Twitter was barely
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Speaker 1: a year old. It didn't yet have pictures, video animated gifts,
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Speaker 1: or even retweets. Users could post teen c one hundred
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Speaker 1: and forty character updates and hope one of their followers
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Speaker 1: saw them. But Chris Messina, a tech consultant, had an
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Speaker 1: idea about how to improve it. He wanted a way
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Speaker 1: for users, including total strangers, to cluster around a subject
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Speaker 1: the weather, the super Bowl, last night's TV show and
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Speaker 1: discuss it. He often went to bar camp meetups, where
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Speaker 1: tech nerds got together in real life to exchange technological ideas.
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Speaker 1: It'd be fun, he thought to have ongoing conversations online
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Speaker 1: about the gatherings. On August third, at three twenty five pm,
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Speaker 1: he tweeted a suggestion, how do you feel about using
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Speaker 1: hashtag pound for groups? As in hashtag bar camp. Messina
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Speaker 1: didn't realize it, but he'd just changed the way people
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Speaker 1: would communicate online. He had invented a modern day web
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Speaker 1: use for the hashtag. His idea was a clever borrowing
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Speaker 1: of an older, earlier Internet behavior. In the nineties, users
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Speaker 1: of Internet relay chat, a form of real time messaging,
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Speaker 1: would deploy the pound sign as it's called on landline
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Speaker 1: phones to create separate rooms for specific subjects, such as
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Speaker 1: hashtag Microsoft or hashtag Linux. But on Twitter, hashtags quickly
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Speaker 1: grew into something new, a powerful way for da everyday
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Speaker 1: users to kick start conversations on a global scale. It
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Speaker 1: would show what the zeitgeist was and show the conversation
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Speaker 1: that was happening digitally in real time. As Messina, now
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Speaker 1: an investor and a product designer, told me recently, the
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Speaker 1: folks at Twitter hated it. It's ugly. Biz Stone, a
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Speaker 1: co founder, told him the doubters were wrong. Hashtags exploded
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Speaker 1: on the platform as users discovered they were a brilliant
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Speaker 1: way to connect people and ideas, using a hashtag meant
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Speaker 1: participating in any fast moving conversation, especially regarding news events. Indeed,
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Speaker 1: only a few weeks after Messina shared his idea, a
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Speaker 1: ferocious fire erupted in San Diego, Twitter users began adding
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Speaker 1: hashtag San Diego fire to updates to allow users to
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Speaker 1: follow what was going on. Within hours, Messina recalls it
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Speaker 1: was clear that monitoring hashtag San Diego fire was quote
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Speaker 1: better than trying to tune in to the place police
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Speaker 1: or firefighters radio channels to figure out where the evacuations
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Speaker 1: were happening. What followed was a new form of citizen journalism.
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Speaker 1: When major events such as the two thousand and nine
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Speaker 1: democratic uprising in Iran hashtag Iran election, the hashtag super Bowl,
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Speaker 1: or Barack Obama's State of the Union address hashtag SOTU occurred,
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Speaker 1: users could follow not just what the mainstream media was reporting,
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Speaker 1: but updates and opinions from everyday people in real time.
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Speaker 1: Because anyone could post a hashtag about literally anything, Twitter
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Speaker 1: users created millions of tiny, bespoke communities, says Gene Burgess,
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Speaker 1: digital media professor at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia,
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Speaker 1: where she lives. Local farmers, not necessarily the most digitally
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Speaker 1: savvy users began using the hashtag agcchatz or agchat oz
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Speaker 1: to virtually meet weekly and just chat about rural policy
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Speaker 1: or what's going on with the weather. Hashtags offered the
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Speaker 1: magical feeling of being in a huge crowd where you
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Speaker 1: could watch history unfold right in front of you. An
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Speaker 1: airplane landed in the Hudson River, Let's talk about it.
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Speaker 1: They also allow you to be funny and playful, like
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Speaker 1: adding hashtag I can't believe I'm saying this after an
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Speaker 1: embarrassing admission. It was like the thing we're saying in
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Speaker 1: the aside whispered in someone's ear, says Gretchen McCulloch, a
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Speaker 1: linguist who specializes in online communication. After the two thousand
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Speaker 1: and eight presidential election, the hashtag became inextricable from political organizing.
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Speaker 1: Tea Party members relied on hashtags from hashtag Tea Party
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Speaker 1: to hashtag t COT for top conservatives on Twitter to
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Speaker 1: spread their message, as did the denizens of hashtag Occupy
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Speaker 1: Wall Street. In the wake of the twenty thirteen acquittal
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Speaker 1: of Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman, activists began using the
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Speaker 1: tag hashtag black Lives Matter to discuss policing in black communities.
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Speaker 1: Not long after came hashtag me Too, coined by the
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Speaker 1: writer and organizer t Rana Burke, which spread wildly when
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Speaker 1: women began using it to discuss sexual predation and assault.
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Speaker 1: With hashtags, the political sphere became shaped not just by elites,
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Speaker 1: but by all. No longer did you have to wait
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Speaker 1: to be interviewed on the six p M or the
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Speaker 1: ten p M news, says Andre Brock, Associate Professor of
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Speaker 1: Black Digital Media at Georgia Tech. You could write your
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Speaker 1: little utterance, put the hashtag in there, and it could
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Speaker 1: be seen by millions of people. In twenty fourteen, Scrabble
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Speaker 1: made hashtag a playable word, and the Oxford English Dictionary
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Speaker 1: added it. Tags were prominent on movie posters, ads, and
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Speaker 1: graffiti murals. The hashtag's success had pros and cons. It
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Speaker 1: allowed people to spread messages promoting social change for world
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Speaker 1: shaking rebellions like hashtag Arab Spring, or even manufactured moments
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Speaker 1: like the hashtag ice Bucket Challenge, But it also offered
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Speaker 1: new ways to harass and bully at scale, and to
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Speaker 1: supercharge conspiracy theories. It helped cluster like minded folks into
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Speaker 1: online echo chambers, and the hashtag's popularity ultimately led ironically
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Speaker 1: to its decline. As more services Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and
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Speaker 1: YouTube adopted hashtags, influencers and marketers began jamming dozens of
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Speaker 1: tags onto each post, hoping to maximize their audiences. This
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Speaker 1: cluttered the screen and began to annoy users, who nowadays
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Speaker 1: are more likely to ignore them. Meanwhile, trolls increasingly hijacked
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Speaker 1: popular hashtags by using them to target and insult people.
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Speaker 1: In the twenty twenties, social networks began relying more heavily
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Speaker 1: on an algorithmic sorting of their feeds, hashtags lost their
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Speaker 1: power to draw attention. Still, the the hashtag isn't dead.
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Speaker 1: Creators continue to sprinkle them in posts, and they still
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Speaker 1: festooned posters, but the blazing period when they single handedly
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Speaker 1: channeled global conversation has come to an end. They're a
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Speaker 1: reminder though, of what was so experimental, chaotic, and thrilling
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Speaker 1: about the early days of social media, when a stray
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Speaker 1: suggestion by a random user could change how the Internet worked.
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Speaker 1: And with this article, memes stupid or hilarious, they can
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Speaker 1: be dumb and inspired, vanilla, and shocking. Most of all,
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Speaker 1: They're Everywhere by Ted Scheinman. Much of the Internet's terrible
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Speaker 1: beauty comes from watching strangers imitate one another, particularly via
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Speaker 1: Internet memes. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme
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Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy six, defining it as a unit of
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Speaker 1: cultural transmission or imitation. For Dawkins, memes including beliefs, catchphrases,
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Speaker 1: and fashion trends, behaved rather like genes or viruses, reproducing
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Speaker 1: and mutating. By nineteen ninety one, the philosopher and cognitive
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Speaker 1: scientist Daniel Dennett observed that cultural memes were replicating at
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Speaker 1: rates that make even fruitflies and yeast cells look glacial
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Speaker 1: in comparison. Things were about to accelerate further as early
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Speaker 1: Internet memes, often simple images superimposed with text, emerged in
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Speaker 1: the mid nineties, exploding on upstart American platforms like Reddit,
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Speaker 1: eBaum's World, and Something Awful. These were deadpan, little handshakes
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Speaker 1: extended by weird individuals to other weird individuals. Yet online
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Speaker 1: memes quickly broke containment. You didn't need to be tech
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Speaker 1: savvy or even young to contract the meme bug. Internet
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Speaker 1: memes allow for endless improvisation and provide a uniquely suitable
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Speaker 1: means of expressing unwieldy or even perverse feelings. Take the
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Speaker 1: horrified girlfriend who sees her boyfriend checking out another woman,
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Speaker 1: or the cartoon dog sitting at a table drinking coffee
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Speaker 1: and telling himself this is fine while the room around
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Speaker 1: him is engulfed in flames. That's a very efficient way
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Speaker 1: of communicating a crisis otherwise best described in German philosophy.
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Speaker 1: Internet memes are also popular among extremists, as are most
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Speaker 1: rhetorical innovations, from hyperbole to alliteration. With their dense compression
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Speaker 1: of meaning and ability to travel, memes have changed the
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Speaker 1: way many of us communicate, even when we're not online.
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Speaker 1: They are a participatory language for the age of mass networks,
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Speaker 1: and they give everyone the chance to be in on
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Speaker 1: the joke. And with this article, did you know Bye
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Speaker 1: bye Birdie? Twitter, the platform that spawned the modern hashtag,
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Speaker 1: shuddered in twenty twenty two, replaced with the rebranded site
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Speaker 1: known as x. At its peak that same year, about
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Speaker 1: three hundred and seventy million users were registered on Twitter
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Speaker 1: world wide. The former brand's blue bird logo is no
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Speaker 1: longer used, and terms such as retweet are slowly disappearing
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Speaker 1: from the lexicon. Next The Whole World in Your Hand
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Speaker 1: by Tracy Scott Forsen. When Martin Cooper placed the first
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Speaker 1: ever cell phone call on a clunky ten inch nearly
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Speaker 1: three pound Motorola Dine Attack eight thousand X handset in
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Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three, he didn't mince words. Joel, I'm calling
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Speaker 1: you from a cell phone, a personal portable hand held
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Speaker 1: cell phone, he remembers telling a rival engineer Joel Ingel.
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Speaker 1: Cooper knew he was ushering in a communications revolution, but
18:42
Speaker 1: even he could not have foreseen how the device would
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Speaker 1: come to change nearly every facet of modern life. By
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Speaker 1: the late nineteen nineties, cell phone users could make calls,
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Speaker 1: play rudimentary games, and send text messages. But it wasn't
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Speaker 1: until Apple's iPhone was introduced in two thousand seven and
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Speaker 1: its App store a year later that smartphones became the
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Speaker 1: appendages they are today. By replacing not only calculators and maps,
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Speaker 1: but also bank tellers, taxi dispatchers, and more, they have
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Speaker 1: made it easier to sail through daily life while limiting
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Speaker 1: human interaction, connecting us to vast networks, while arguably isolating
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Speaker 1: us a constant companion of finger tap away camera. One
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Speaker 1: of the most remarkable seismic shifts summoned by the smartphone
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Speaker 1: has been with the personal camera. A twenty twenty four
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Speaker 1: report found that more than ninety percent of the four
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Speaker 1: point seven billion photographs taken every day are shot with smartphones.
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Speaker 1: Maps GPS technology long pre dates smartphones, but calling up
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Speaker 1: directions on your phone has become an essential part of
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Speaker 1: every road trip or city venture. Nostalgia may weep for
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Speaker 1: the serendipitous fines you'd come across when lost, but being
20:01
Speaker 1: able to avoid that five mile traffic backup is quite
20:04
Speaker 1: nice too. Food Tonight's dinner could be a delivery ordered
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Speaker 1: from door dash or from a recipe on the New
20:13
Speaker 1: York Times cooking app. The world is literally your oyster.
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Speaker 1: Just be sure to snap a pick to post on Instagram.
20:23
Speaker 1: Time Pieces Got the time? Used to be a common question,
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Speaker 1: but now everyone carries a clock in their pocket or purse.
20:30
Speaker 1: In the twenty tens, smart watches hit the market, and
20:33
Speaker 1: step trackers such as Fitbit turned a watch into a
20:36
Speaker 1: personal trainer. Television cultural critic Derrick Thompson recently wrote an
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Speaker 1: essay titled Everything is Television, in which he postulated that
20:48
Speaker 1: culture of all forms, podcasts, movies, art, memes are turning
20:53
Speaker 1: into what used to arrive via antennas on a box
20:56
Speaker 1: in the family rooms and games. What's a six letter
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Speaker 1: word for a blockbuster game with the humble beginning try
21:06
Speaker 1: wordle According to The New York Times, millions of players
21:09
Speaker 1: take a stab at guessing each day's words, and its
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Speaker 1: games were played more than eleven point two billion times
21:16
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty five. Hailing a ride perhaps the most
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Speaker 1: noteworthy example of a Silicon Valley startup disrupting an entire industry.
21:27
Speaker 1: Ride sharing apps such as Uber and Lyft hit the
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Speaker 1: roads running in the early twenty tens. Uber recorded more
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Speaker 1: than thirteen point five billion trips in twenty twenty five.
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Speaker 1: Music the technology has come a long way since transistor
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Speaker 1: radios and the Walkman. Last year, Spotify boasted more than
21:49
Speaker 1: seven hundred million listeners to its music, podcast and audiobook offerings.
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Speaker 1: The top artist around the world Puerto Rico's Bad Bunny,
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Speaker 1: his fourth time earning that title. E Books, Can a
22:04
Speaker 1: book still be called a page turner if even it's
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Speaker 1: not on paper? Even as e readers continue to be popular.
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Speaker 1: Apps also give the daily commuter or beach bum the
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Speaker 1: chance to pour through their favorite reads on their smartphones.
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Speaker 1: Mail in one day, you can hear from the same
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Speaker 1: friend via text, email, Google chat, Instagram, DM slack, a
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Speaker 1: group chat on WhatsApp, and many more methods of communication
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Speaker 1: happening instantaneously via a friendly note delivered by the postal service.
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Speaker 1: Hardly ever, telephone. Even though modern English still uses the
22:43
Speaker 1: term dial to call a friend, the rotary phone hasn't
22:46
Speaker 1: been a regular feature of daily life in more than
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Speaker 1: four decades. Today, many find a video chat is preferable
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Speaker 1: to a phone call. And Finally, banking, the days of
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Speaker 1: writing a personal check or balance and sing a checkbook
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Speaker 1: may be waning. A new study reported that only twenty
23:04
Speaker 1: six percent of gen Zers have ever written a check.
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Speaker 1: Banking apps and money transfer apps like Venmo have made
23:11
Speaker 1: the practice rare and in many instances unnecessary. Finally, with
23:18
Speaker 1: a few tweaks, the country's favorite sports went from pastimes
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Speaker 1: to part of the fabric of our culture. Can you
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Speaker 1: imagine a football game where there was never a passing play?
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Speaker 1: The forward pass is just one of the innovations that
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Speaker 1: made these contests into events by David J. Roth. The
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Speaker 1: forward pass. In its earliest days, football was brutal, even deadly,
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Speaker 1: with offense and defense smashing and scrabbling for a yard
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Speaker 1: or two at a time. The Chicago Tribune reported that
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Speaker 1: nineteen athletes died playing the sport in nineteen oh five alone,
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Speaker 1: the last year before college football's rules committee legalized the
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Speaker 1: forward pass to prevent total barbarism. Notre Dame's subsequent success
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Speaker 1: with the passing game set football toward the more open, creative,
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Speaker 1: full field sport played today, still brutal, but more elegant
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Speaker 1: and much more popular. Baseball's farm system. In the early
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Speaker 1: nineteen twenties, manager Branch Rickey realized that his cash poor
24:28
Speaker 1: Saint Louis Cardinals were quote at a disadvantage in obtaining
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Speaker 1: players of merit from the miners end quote, then a
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Speaker 1: sprawling and ad hoc enterprise. Rickey's Cardinals took over a
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Speaker 1: minor league team in Houston in nineteen twenty four, and
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Speaker 1: from there gradually built a system through which young players
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Speaker 1: could improve over years, learning the finer points of a
24:52
Speaker 1: difficult sport while staying under the control of one team.
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Speaker 1: It was a sound investment that made him history. Soon
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Speaker 1: every other team followed suit. A quarter century afterward, Ricky
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Speaker 1: signed Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers. Integrating baseball, the latter
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Speaker 1: milestone in sports history, helped redefine American culture. Night baseball.
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Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty the Negro League's Kansas City Monarchs started
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Speaker 1: traveling with six floodlights on flatbed trucks, and their resulting
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Speaker 1: night games gave fans with day jobs the chance to
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Speaker 1: see live baseball. Crowds flocked, and big league clubs came
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Speaker 1: around to playing under the lights from the White House,
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Speaker 1: President Franklin Roosevelt through the first switch to illuminate Crosley
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Speaker 1: Field before the Cincinnati Reds played and won MLB's first
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Speaker 1: night game in nineteen thirty five, Ohio crowd of twenty thousand,
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Speaker 1: four hundred twenty two was nearly ten times the team's
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Speaker 1: average daytime draw. Attendance skyrocketed, and eleven of MLB's sixteen
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Speaker 1: teams had electrified. By America's entry into World War II,
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Speaker 1: the lights helped usher in the era of live sports
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Speaker 1: as the premiere television product. The shot clock. Basketball before
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Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties was a dry game of keep away,
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Speaker 1: until the shot clock made its NBA debut in the
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Speaker 1: nineteen fifty four fifty five season. Syracuse National's owner Danny
26:45
Speaker 1: Biasone devised the concept with NAT's general manager Leo Ferris.
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Speaker 1: In the Liveliest Games, Biasone said, I noticed each team
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Speaker 1: took about sixty shots. That meant one hundred twenty ty
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Speaker 1: shots per game. So I took forty eight minutes and
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Speaker 1: divided that by one hundred and twenty shots. That left
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Speaker 1: teams with twenty four seconds per possession, enough to imbue
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Speaker 1: each trip down the floor with urgency. And with this
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Speaker 1: article did you know the Major League Baseball pitch clock?
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Speaker 1: In twenty twenty three, Major League Baseball introduced a new
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Speaker 1: innervation with the goal of shortening game times, a pitch clock.
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Speaker 1: In its first year, the average length of a nine
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Speaker 1: inning game dropped twenty four minutes, the shortest since nineteen
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Speaker 1: eighty five. Despite initial fears that the clock would increase
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Speaker 1: injuries to pitchers, analyzes found that no statistically significant increase occurred,
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Speaker 1: and the number of Tommy John surgeries had actually decreased.
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Speaker 1: This concludes readings from The Smithsonian Magazine for today. Your
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Speaker 1: reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening and
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Speaker 1: have a great day.