2011: For Better or Worse
Written By: Anna Doherty, Social Coordinator
If there’s one thing marketers and advertisers love, it’s making predictions. But we aren’t most marketers or advertisers. So rather than predict the next big thing, let’s reminisce on the old big things. Strap on your seatbelts because you’re about to be transported into the past, say a decade ago, to when we were too busy planking and making fun of “Friday” by Rebecca Black to make predictions. Yup, you guessed it, 2011.
Let’s set the scene: You pull your 4.5-by-2.3 inch iPhone 4 out of your pocket and open up the Facebook app. You poke your friends back and tend to your crops on FarmVille, a game that would later end up on TIME Magazine’s list of the 50 Worst Inventions. Life is simple.
Next, you scroll through Twitter favoriting tweets about #BadLuckBrian with the click of a star icon, blissfully unaware of the absence of political strife that would come to dominate the platform in the coming decade. Ahhh, the good old days.
You refresh your latest Instagram post, an oversaturated photo of your dog with an OG IG filter (Clarendon) and watch ten sloppy usernames riddled with underscores transform into a clean and satisfying “11 likes.” Scrolling through your feed, friends share grainy images of their breakfast or the beach without a single #ad or blue checkmark in sight.
After opening Snapchat to send a video of yourself puking rainbows to your friends, you check to see who the app lists as their three best friends, information that for teens at the time was a surefire code for who’s crushing on who.
Lastly, you open up YouTube to get your daily dose of nyan cat and FЯED. After watching Fred go to the dentist, sans Invisalign sponsorship, you go back to FarmVille, cause let’s face it, you’re addicted.
Wasn’t that a fun ride? Unfortunately, it’s time to hop off and return to reality.
It’s 2021, and you’re so zuckin’ sick of Facebook. Between the politics, the data mining, and the unwanted daily status updates from your crazy aunt Becky (not to be mistaken with the one who just got out of prison) you’ve probably moved Facebook from the top of your social media totem pole to the bottom.
It’s been a while since you’ve seen a #BadLuckBrian meme on Twitter, but you saw him last Friday night while playing What Do You Meme, a game that wouldn’t have made any sense if you tried to explain it to someone a decade ago. Brian, whose name isn’t even Brian, it’s Kyle, has become a pioneer of meme culture, which has proliferated into somewhat of its own language on just about every corner of the internet.
Since Brian’s time, Twitter has become less of a meme mine and more of a vehicle for advertising. The first Super Bowl advertisement to reference a Twitter hashtag was Audi in, you guessed it, 2011. Since then, Twitter hashtags have become an essential component of ad campaigns, Super Bowl or not.
It’s hard to remember a life before influencers but go on Instagram these days and that’s all you’ll see. It almost makes you miss the original interface, even though you freaked out when Instagram first introduced ‘stories’ in 2016, vowing to never use them and remain loyal to Snapchat. Famous last words.
The evolution of YouTube in the past decade is perhaps the most interesting. In 2011, there were more than one trillion playbacks on the platform. Today, there are a billion hours streamed on YouTube every day, which would amount to far more than one trillion playbacks in a single year. That’s 2.5x the daily streaming hours of Netflix. If this tells us anything, it’s that Andrew Keen, one of the world’s best known commentators on the digital revolution, was right when he said that “The future, for better or worse, is Fred” back in 2011. But instead of Fred, who is pretty much unheard from these days, it’s people like Charli D’Amelio.
Whether you got all those references, or you’re like our CEO who had to have a few of them explained to him, we hope you enjoyed reminiscing with us. For better or worse, 2011 was a hell of a time to be alive. We can’t wait to see what 2031 has in store!
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