Remember the dress?

No, not That dress. I mean "The dress" - the one that was blue and black, but some people thought it looked like it was gold and white in a photo that went viral in 2015.

In case you don't remember - which means either you were living under a rock at the time, or you're simply too young to recall - everyone was talking about it.

Everyone.

Taylor Swift's tweet—which described how while she saw it as blue and black, the whole thing left her "confused and scared"—was retweeted 111,134 times and liked 154,188 times.

(Remember, this was in 2015; the context was different, so those numbers were bigger at the time...)

Jaden Smith, Frankie Muniz, Demi Lovato, Mindy Kaling, and Justin Bieber agreed that the dress was blue and black, while Anna Kendrick, B. J. Novak, Katy Perry, Julianne Moore, and Sarah Hyland saw it as white and gold. Kim Kardashian tweeted that she saw it as white and gold, while her husband Kanye West saw it as blue and black. Lucy Hale, Phoebe Tonkin, and Katie Nolan saw different colour schemes at different times. Lady Gaga described the dress as "periwinkle and sand," while David Duchovny called it teal. Other celebrities, including Ellen DeGeneres and Ariana Grande, mentioned the dress on social media without mentioning specific colours. Politicians, government agencies and social media platforms of well-known brands also weighed in tongue-in-cheek on the issue. Ultimately, the dress was the subject of 4.4 million tweets within 24 hours.

That dress.

It was one of those weird days where something happens on the internet that goes all kinds of crazy. I think I've safely left it long enough now to not be caught up in the whole bubble of "people on the internet talking about people on the internet talking about people on the internet talking about something" (maybe in another seven years I'll be ready to talk about the Euros final last weekend...)

There were a few things that I found fascinating about the whole thing. One was the simple fact that different people were perceiving the same thing in different ways. Another was the fact that people were talking about what they were perceiving, and through that becoming aware that other people were perceiving the same thing in different ways. And then there was the enormous virality of the story.

I think the interesting thing it all boils down to is “the medium is the message”. Which is to say that the content (that is, the dress/photo) is much less important in the grand scheme of things than what it tells us about the context that it happened in. In other words, although what happened around #TheDress was no doubt fuelled by TV and 'traditional' media, the story itself could only really have happened online, and I think its worth looking at exactly what happened and how it can help us to understand 'the internet', and the issue of the difference between perception and reality.

In other words, this is a bunch of things that #TheDress got me thinking about, roughly in order from the least interesting to the most.

1. What colour was the dress?

The dress was blue and black. It was pretty straightforward to find this out for yourself, if you went back to the original Tumblr post to see what else was being posted there – it was linked to by the Buzzfeed article, which was in turn linked to by just about every other story about “The Dress”.

There isn't really anything special about the dress. Its just a dress.

2. What colour was the dress in the picture?

The dress in the picture was neither black and blue, nor was it gold and white. The “black” wasn’t really black, and the “white” wasn’t really white. The talk was all about the perceived colour of the picture of the dress. Which then leads into some interesting science about how your eyes and brain and cameras and light all work.

3. Why did people perceive the dress to be different colours?

Its all to do with the way that a camera compensates for light levels and colours, mimicking the way that the human eye compensates for light levels, and the way that (it seems) ambient light levels when you are looking at “the photo” changes the way your brain interprets the picture.

If this is the kind of thing that you thought was interesting, then Wired seemed to have the definitive article for you, which because of things like homophily you will probably have seen at the time, linked in your Facebook/Twitter newsfeeds because your friends probably also find that kind of thing interesting.

http://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/

4. Perception and points of view

I would guess I’ve probably thought about the subject of colour perception more than most; about 30 years ago I found out that I was colourblind, which meant I was never going to grow up to be the RAF pilot I had dreamed of being, so I’ve known for a fact for most of my life that the colours I see are different to the colours that most people see, in some weird way that I still don't totally understand, but seems to mainly involve red and green.

But I know that while we can stick the same label on the same bands of frequencies of light, you can't prove that the colour that I percieve as green isn't what you perceive as red. (Or blue, or whatever.) Perception of colours are what is called a qualia; a particular type of experience that can only be understood through experiencing it yourself. (For example, how would you describe "red" without referring to 'something red'?)

So I guess it was interesting to some who were seeing a kind of evidence of this, maybe for the first time – that we might be looking at the same object, but seeing something different.

The interesting thing about the two dresses/one picture thing is that it isn't about a choice of perception. In most famous optical illusions (I'm thinking of things like the rabbit/duck, or old/young woman pictures), you can choose to interpret lines in a particular way and then see the colour that you are looking for. The whole reason that optical illusions "work" is that you can see both versions on your own.

But the dress is different. It seems that people who see black and blue cannot possibly imagine how the same dress could appear white and gold to someone else- and vice versa. Your brain is being fooled, but it doesn't have the power to tell itself how it is being fooled and compensate for it. You cant see both sides of the story on your own.

So, the photo on its own isn't a story. Its just a picture of a dress. You need to know that someone else sees something else before the picture goes from being a pretty bad, washed out photo of a prety ordinary dress to being a phenomenon so viral that Buzzfeed had two editorial teams assigned to writing more stories about it to capitalise on the buzz.

5. The conversational spark

So, the interesting thing is that people knew that they were seeing something different because they were talking about, and that then drove the conversation (ie. led to more people talking about it.)

Thinking about how that conversation got started- I mean, how many pictures do you see on the internet in a given day? How many of those do you ever describe to someone? How many of those are to someone who can also see the same picture?

Or to put it another way, how many pictures might you be perceiving as a different to the person right next to you, but never discover because nobody mentions anything about how they perceive it. If the dress had happened to be on a Powerpoint slide in front of a room full of people – imagine a large conference, with a few hundred people all watching, listening, maybe tweeting away on a conference hashtag, maybe quietly chatting to the person next to them – what are the chances that anyone in the room would have picked up that half of the room were seeing a different coloured dress to the other half?

I reckon the chances are pretty slim. Basically zero.

So, there is a point there that this wasn't just a phenomenon of vision or colour perception (or photography, or fashion); there was something going on that was inherently social. It wasn't about the dress, but it wasn't really about the picture of the dress either. It was about the conversations around the picture of the dress. ("Have you seen the dress"? "What colour do you see?" "I used to see one, now I see the other." "Everyone is talking about..." "Buzzfeed's servers were crashed by..." "Hey, that dress thing we were talking about earlier, I've just had an email from..." "Here is a picture of the same dress" "Look, a scientist has said that...")

6. Where did the story live?

What was the actual story? If we say that the story was the conversations around the picture (not the dress, and not the picture itself), then where did that story live – if anywhere?

You can trace the trail back to find out where “the dress” came from. For me, it was a tweet about a trend, which led me to a Twitter search, which led me to a bunch of tweets about “#TheDress”. (As an aside, this seems to be the way I find out about “news” these days – people on Twitter are talking about the story of “the news”, leading me to search for the actual report of the News. Its honestly shocking how different the source and the story can be. But its a very exhausting way of following current events, and I'm not at all surprised that most people don't do it. Maybe if I spent less time going down rabbit holes, I'd have a broader understanding of whats going on in the world...)

The source of the story, as far as most people seem to be concerned, was the original Buzzfeed article - which was probably the most widely linked, widely read, 'most viral' reporting of the story.

But that article was effectively a repost of a conversation that was happening on Tumblr. It seems reasonably safe to say that the Tumblr post without the Buzzfeed story wouldn't have got nearly as big as it did.

But the Tumblr post wasn't the real start of the story either– it was an extension of a conversation that was apparently happening around a photo on Facebook.

So, what was the story? Was it the dress, the picture of the dress, the private conversation on Facebook around the picture of the dress, the extension of the conversation to 'public' Tumblr, the Buzzfeed post about the conversation... If you say that "the story" couldn't have happened without Buzzfeed, then maybe its just as fair to say that the story couldn't have happened without celebrities on Twitter as well, being the social platform where links like that propogate fast and wide (that also happens to provide journalists with easily found celebrity quotes that they can use for free). But then, the story couldn't have happened without the photo getting shared on Facebook in the first place – Facebook being a unique platform in that it has over a billion users, but still has something of an element of privacy at its core.

They all played a part. Which is why I come to the conclusion that its the kind of story that could only really happen online, but probably (maybe) only online in this particular window, where Facebook usage was where it was right then, Buzzfeed was providing a platform to detect and distribute stories with that kind of "viral potential" (I don't think it holds quite the same place in popular culture as it did in 2015 - I could be wrong), Twitter providing a platform for the links to spread and so on.

If it happened today, I'm pretty sure that TikTok would play a significant role very early on, and maybe I'd be saying that it could only happen thanks to TikTok's conversational tone, heavy use of video (for all those reaction shots) and AI based 'virality detection'. In another 7 years time, commercial forces will no doubt have changed those platforms (again), we will be using a whole new generation - possibly even new categories - of internet-connected devices and the same thing would - probably - unfold in a totally different way again.

But I'm in absolutely no doubt that 'the story' - that is, the clash of people perceiving the same thing in totally different ways - is fundamentally a phenomenon unique to the internet that is going to come up again and again.

7. The virality cycle

I mentioned a couple of publishers already; Buzzfeed and Wired both got onto the story in its early stages and produced unique, distinctive content that fuelled its spread. Facebook and Twitter (which are different kinds of publishers) played their part in spreading it further and faster. But the fact is that the story got repeated countless times.

There were the LinkedIn blogs, more LinkedIn blogs and more LinkedIn blogs that rode the story to try to capture people's attention (which Beeston's Law tells us is inevitable.) There were the brandjacking attempts. There were the trade press pieces about the brandjacking.

Then there were the reactions to the reactions; the BBC had a piece on what Wittgenstein would have said about the dress. MTV had a picture of someone who got a tattoo of the dress. The Metro had a collection of what celebrities were tweeting about it (so thats a website for a newspaper reporting on what celebreties on social media were saying about a Buzzfeed story about a Tumblr post about a Facebook conversation about a photo of a dress… which is enough to make my head spin, but is also probably the best illustration of what I mean when I say that by this stage the story wasn't really about 'the dress' any more.)

Digiday has a good article on why Buzzfeed won, and why its a bad idea for 'premium publishers' to try and out-Buzzfeed Buzzfeed;

These brands will have to compete purely on BuzzFeed’s terms. As the saying goes, the problem with wrestling a pig is you get dirty and the pig enjoys it. For legacy publishers, getting in the mud means amassing enormous audiences with incredibly popular content. There’s little chance they’ll compete as well as the BuzzFeed machine. On the other end, BuzzFeed continues to establish itself as a credible source of serious news. Its dress post came with suggestions for an investigative piece on how universities rely on animal experiments for revenue, a listicle of hangover cure meals and a promotion of a new BuzzFeed cute-pet app.

And now – seven years later – I'm (eventually) writing up my take on it here. (Which probably tells you everything you need to know about me and my blogging style...)

But there's something I learned about 'content' from Netflix; there are essentially two types of content on Netflix; the stuff that gets you to subscribe (eg. Stranger Things) and the stuff that you spend time watching that stops you from unsubscribing (eg. Friends, Brooklyn-99). "The dress" was a story that publishers used to get their audiences to spend time on their sites - which meant tailoring the content to make it relevant to the site's audiences - which is different for the Mail, the BBC, MTV etc. Even a single, globally consistent story ('people see this photo differently!') becomes a network of smaller stories that only a handful of the total 'story audience' will ever see. Which means 'the story' becomes a collection of fregmented, different stories, for a a collection of fragmented, different audiences.

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"#TheDress" is an interesting thing to think about because in itself, it doesn't matter. It didn't really matter at the time, and it matters even less today. There isn't any worry in the slightest that conjecture will turn to belief, and violence will happen off the back of disagreement about it. In 2015 it was a social, viral, publishing phenomenon. In 2021, at best, its the answer to a trivia quiz question in a loosely defined "the internet" category. Nobody really cares about it. (Except possibly that person who had the tattoo...)

Football doesn't really matter either - but plenty of people care about it. Fans care deeply about their team, non-fans care about the ridiculousness of the whole multi-million pound sportsball industry. But when a football team kneels down before a game and the population is split between seeing a statement against racism or clear and undeniable evidence that they are the puppets of a dangerous, far-left Marxist organisation, but nobody seems to be talking about perspectives other than their own... It becomes a bunch of stories about who did or didn't support it at the time, whether refusing to condemn the booing is the same as supporting the team for taking the knee (for all of Boris' photo opportunities, its noteworthy that whatever he said - or claims to have said - there aren't any photos of him 'taking the knee' himself.) I think the way one story becomes a colelction of different stories does matter. Quite a lot. (Which is why I'm writing about 'the dress' today instead - a far less contentious subject.)

When a novel virus breaks out and causes a global pandemic that some perceive as a natural disaster, while others perceive it as evidence of Chinese biological warfare, or an attempt to establish a New World Order via a Great Reset of the economy, or even some sort of political opportunity to be capitalised on... I think that matters too. Especially when it comes to how we try to control its spread while getting on with living our lives.

And the next time a global incident diverts the whole world's attention in a matter of minutes to something unfolding on live TV with consequences that will last for years, it will be in a world that is very different to the world of September 11th 2001. And that will definitely matter.

Hopefully by then, we will have a better idea of how to deal with it than we do today- which, based on what I've seen on Twitter in the last couple of weeks seems to pretty much amount to shouting "this is what I see" at one another.

Meanwhile, while we assume that we're all looking at the same thing…