Gather round, one and all, gather round, for a tale is being told of a bygone age of wonder: This man is explaining to his kids that in 2005 a single JibJab video was enough content to last society an entire year.
Ah, and what heady days of bounty they were!
The bewitching journey into the past began when young Sally Pecci looked up from a post declaring the “Barbenheimer” meme officially over and asked her father if viral content had always had a half-life of between two and three weeks. “Not always,” stated Mr. Pecci matter-of-factly, going on to reminisce that when he had been a college student, a two minute parody song from JibJab.com had been all the content society needed to sustain itself for the whole of 2005. “That simple, rudimentary animation of George Bush singing about his plans for a second term was enough for people, and we went as wild for its barbs about taxes and the Iraq War in January as we did the next December,” he recalled with a wistful smile.
“But wouldn’t the JibJab video be considered to have run its course once it was tweeted about by a politician or national restaurant chain?” inquired Sally’s brother Elias coming over from across the yard, his interest clearly piqued by his father’s captivating tale. “Well son, back in those days there was no Twitter,” answered the man, pausing to give his wide-eyed children a moment to make sense of what he had just said. “When we wanted to make a video go viral, we had to copy the link into an email and add our friends and coworkers to it one by one, and then convince them to go and do the same thing with all of their friends and coworkers. It was a heck of a lot more work than just hitting the retweet button and calling it a day, let me tell you, and that’s even before accounting for the download speeds.” Confused, Sally asked how people knew when they had to move on to a new viral phenomenon if there were no social media algorithms to tell them, to which her father replied that such a concern simply wasn’t something people of the time worried about—they would happily watch and rewatch the JibJab video as many times as they pleased without its digs at John Kerry and Jacques Chirac ever becoming stale.
Who indeed would believe such a thing if they hadn’t lived it themselves?
The kids have since pulled up a copy of the JibJab video on YouTube to see the fabled content firsthand, struggling to comprehend that it had once endured in popularity for a timespan equivalent to nearly thirty of today’s viral sensations. They briefly attempted to find a version with higher resolution before their father explained that 480p was as high as the clip would go, as people back then considered themselves damn lucky to get a video in 480p off Kazaa if they could do so in under an hour and without getting a virus or a version with Goatse spliced in, not to mention the fact that the CRT displays folks had could barely handle 480p as it was.
As the family watched the crudely animated George Bush dance in front of the 2004 electoral map together, Sally and Elias were able to catch a fleeting glimpse of a lost time, a time before memes with weeklong lifecycles, a time before want, a time in which 2023’s unending churn of instantly obsolete virality would seem as alien and unthinkable as 2005’s limitless enjoyment of a single JibJab video seems to us today. Having finished the video, the elder Pecci is now sentimentally recounting for his spellbound children how merely reciting lines from the video was among the most popular activities at parties of the day, and was indeed the very manner in which he first caught their mother’s eye.
Ah, how pleasant to recall those extravagant days of yore. May we one day be so lucky to find content that lasts us even half as long as that JibJab video lasted us then!
