MTV turns 30 today. Melinda Newman reflects on the network's radical cultural impact:
I was music video editor at Billboard in the early ‘90s. Covering MTV fell under my purview and it felt like the largest, most powerful force not just in the music industry, but in pop culture. That’s because it was. This was before the internet. This was before the dominance of video games. MTV wasn’t just king of the mountain, it was the mountain … [It] was spreading its manifest destiny across the world and it never ceased to amaze me that certain Eastern Bloc countries may have still been in political and civil turmoil back then, but, by God, they would have their MTV.
ShortFormBlog dug up the cultural artifact seen above:
Kurt Loder, circa 1995, explaining the internet to the plebes watching MTV News.
Unlike this classic clip of the Today Show anchors acting utterly confused about the Internet, Loder seems to know what he’s talking about pretty well. Fun fact: MTV.com has an interesting pre-Web history that involved former VJ Adam Curry of all people buying the domain name before MTV knew that owning this domain name was important. (Also, on a side note: Son Volt, Moby with HAIR, Better Than Ezra’s “Good,” Coolio, virtual reality, and “The Net”-era Sandra Bullock. Wow, time machine.)
Money quote from "cyber journalist" David Bennahum:
Well of course there's a lot of sex online … welcome to the human race.
The Dish 