sticking a fork in the zeitgeist
December 15, 2002
There's no surer sign that a media trendline must have run its course than when it winds up in one of those interminable magazine year-end lists. But as big media zeitgeist-gazing exercises go, today's NYT Magazine issue on "The Year in Ideas" turns out to be less cloying than you might expect.
Of the 100 ideas that made the cut, I was only slightly startled to realize that two of them belonged to folks I happen to have met (albeit briefly) in the past six months: Matt Jones' War-Chalking and Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs (cf. previous post).
Maybe there's hope these ideas will turn out to have legs beyond the year's end - after all, the Gray Lady's editors seem to have identified at least a few other ideas sure to have lasting impact: I find it hard to believe we've heard the last of, for instance, Chocolate Connoisseurship or Endurance Condoms.
File under: User Experience
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