2002 Year-End Zeitgeist

Posted by Dennis G. Jerz on January 10, 2003 12:00 AM | | Comments (0) ~
"2002 Year-End Zeitgeist offers a unique perspective on the year's major events and hottest trends based on more than 55 billion searches conducted over the past year by Google users from around the world."

Top 5 gaining Google queries from 2002:

  1. spiderman
  2. shakira
  3. winter olympics
  4. world cup
  5. avril lavigne
Top 5 declining Google queries from 2002:
  1. nostradamus
  2. napster
  3. world trade center
  4. anthrax
  5. osama bin laden
--2002 Year-End ZeitgeistGoogle)
This listing indicates that the world is moving beyond the events of 9.11.2001. I had toyed with the idea of making Morrowind my next comptuer game purchase... the fact that it's 9th on the "gaining" list makes me more confident it will be a good use of my limited free time. The singers on this list mean nothing to me, though I've used Eminem (7th gaining) in class when my students complained that the rhymed verse of Moliere's 1660's play Tartuffe was unrealistic. Thanks for the link, Rosemary.


Categories: Culture , Cyberculture , Games , Humanities , Literature , PopCult , Technology

Leave a comment

Search

Recent Related Entries

Guarded Optimism for the Future of Reading
Naturally, as an English professor, I've got a vested interest in the future of reading. But you can't have an intellectually healthy society without literacy. I had a high school physics teacher -- Admiral Peebles (a retired nuclear submarine expert)...

Humanities Resource Center Online
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has released a major study that aims to establish benchmarks for assessing the humanities. Assessment was one of the major issues that arose during last year's English program review, so this is worth...

Austenbook
Austenbook (Pride and Prejudice, as it would appear if all the characters interacted on Facebook.)...

The story of a literary hoax; or, how Elizabeth Pepys came to be quoted on "turds that do fly"
A wonderful post by Whitney Anne Trettien, who examines the reception of a feminist spoof of Pepys famous diary, in order to explore the strange human desire to trust those who reveal shameful private failures. (That is, unless her whole...

Deep Throat Meets Data Mining
Journalism is changing. Watchdog journalism -- the perusal of thousands of pages of official records in search of anomalies and other signs of abuse and corruption -- is much harder to do than reporting on celebrity shenanigans or fashion trends....