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this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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an opinion millions of people disagree with :)
could i ask your approximate age? and/or if you remember approximately what year you first saw this comic?
i would guess that someone who doesn't find this comic funny, not to mention historically important, must not be old enough to remember the time when most people hadn't been online yet.
if you're curious, read the two links in this post. i think they answer your question.
Click the article, the comic was originally published in the New Yorker in 1993
When I was about 11 or 12, I had a sleep over with my friends. My friends house had a computer with a microphone and internet access. It was around the year 2000. This was ages before the rise of chat services like Discord. Youtube was not popular, and was very niche. Hearing the voice of an ordinary person say ordinary things was still rare on the internet.
It was 3am, and her parents had gone to bed. Foolishly we had been left alone with the computer. Someone figured out how to find a voice chat program that connected us to random strangers around the world.
We spoke with a man from South Africa for a half hour. We talked about the weather. We asked him if he was afraid of being eaten by lions or trampled by elephants on the regular. He asked what school was like. He asked if we had been to New York , and we told him it was actually quite far away (10? Hours by car) and he seemed amazed by this fact, because we didn’t even live on the west coast. The conversation was so pure, and we were preteen girls speaking to an anonymous man on the internet
We (us girls and the man) were all amazed by the technology. It was like magic: you can have a real time conversation with anyone around the world. A real human conversation with someone you could never normally meet. It is one of my favorite memories.
The comic seems basic, but a long time ago I found it very funny. When the comic was new, we were all still enraptured by the strange new world we had all found ourself in. Without context, without the newness and hope of what the internet could be, the comic isn’t very good. That’s how some art works, though.
The New Yorker is a famous magazine, so the comic was known by people who read newspapers. It predates reddit and the word “meme” used in the context of internet jokes. It was a silly comic in a serious magazine.
Oh, no I have no idea what chat program it was. It probably was Chat Roulette but I've never used it. We didn't have video for the chat, pretty sure her connection was DSL/Dialup, our area was very rural and streaming live video would have been like borrowing a flying car from the Jetsons.
That's so awesome you traded CDs with that dude. I wonder if the internet changed too much and fewer people have these personal connections with random strangers, or if people are just scared of weirdos online now. We were absolutely aware we were playing with fire (which is why we waited until my friends parents went to sleep lmao).
I was trying to help with context it seemed like you were asking when it was published and when it reached its claimed value.
Is this in fact a well known meme? I'd say it was one of the very first internet memes; it was a meme before the word "meme" was used to refer to images on the internet. It was a popular image in print which many people literally saw before (and/or shortly after) they first got online.
It didn't have a page on Know Your Meme until 2012, but it has been on Wikipedia since 2007 and the New York Times wrote about its importance in 2000.
Here is the New York Times article (I used their onion service to avoid their paywall):
Cartoon Captures Spirit of the Internet
By Glenn Fleishman
Dec. 14, 2000
BY now, it's almost an old saying: ''On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.'' You can count on seeing it at the start of plenty of articles on Internet privacy and anonymity.
The sentence, which originated as a caption to a New Yorker cartoon, has slipped into the public consciousness, leaving its source behind. So it's just as accurate to say that on the Internet, nobody knows that you coined a phrase.
That particular sentence was originated by Peter Steiner, a regular contributor to the magazine since 1980. He wrote it as the caption for his July 1993 single-panel cartoon showing a dog sitting at a computer talking to another dog.
''I feel a little like the person (whoever it is) who invented the smiley face,'' Mr. Steiner wrote via e-mail. The cartoon didn't receive much attention at the time, but interest has grown over the last seven years, and the saying has become practically an industry of its own.
The panel is the most reproduced cartoon from The New Yorker, according to Robert Mankoff, the magazine's cartoon editor and the president of the Cartoon Bank, an affiliated division that handles reprints, licensing and merchandising of New Yorker art. Mr. Mankoff said the cartoon had been reprinted hundreds of times. It is also available as a framed print and as a T-shirt via the Cartoon Bank's Web site.
The cartoon appears in many books about technology and regularly shows up in magazines and newspapers. In mid-November, it was reprinted in eCompany Now, a magazine, and in The Seattle Times. But bad scans of the original also appear on hundreds of Web sites that have not paid to reproduce it or asked permission to post it. The Cartoon Bank charges range from less than $100 for using the cartoon in a business presentation to several hundred dollars or more for Web and print use, depending on the site traffic, print run and type of publication.
The caption appears in its original and modified forms (''nobody'' is often rendered as ''no one'') on thousands of Web and print pages. The Google.com search engine produces more than 103,000 potential matches. The saying is often cited as ''that old phrase'' or ''the adage.''
The sentence has made its way into programming code: in the first three editions of ''Just Java 1.1 & Beyond,'' Peter van der Linden used the example of a server trying to detect whether a user was a dog (www.wol.pace.edu/bergin /InternetProgramming.html). Essays borrow the caption for their titles. Search the news archives of any publication, and there will probably be at least one reference.
It even inspired the play ''Nobody Knows I'm a Dog,'' by Alan David Perkins, which is about chat room participants and has had a dozen North American productions. When told in a telephone interview that the phrase had turned up in a play, Mr. Steiner said, ''It's shocking to me to hear that, but still I can't quite fathom that it's that widely known and recognized.''
Mr. Steiner said no publication had ever interviewed him before about the panel. ''People treat cartoons as though they come from somewhere out in space,'' he said. ''Whenever you see articles or books, they name the author. When you see a cartoon, you see the place it appeared in.'' Readers may see the signature in the cartoon but remember and cite only the publication.
Although Mr. Steiner knew about the Internet and had an account at an online service when he created the cartoon, he wasn't particularly focused on the Net. ''I did the drawing of these dogs at the computer like one of those make-up-a-caption contests,'' he said. ''There wasn't any profound tapping into the zeitgeist. I guess, though, when you tap into the zeitgeist you don't necessarily know you're doing it.''
In a 1995 interview with PBS for the program ''Understanding the Internet,'' Rick Adams, one of the developers of Arpanet, the Web's precursor, said, ''The fact that the New Yorker could use the word Internet as the punch line in a cartoon was to me the defining popularization of the Internet.'' In a 1996 interview in OnTheInternet (a Web publication that has ceased publishing), Jon Postel, an Arpanet pioneer, said the cartoon signaled to him that the print media didn't have to define the Internet every time it was used. (Mr. Postel died in 1998.)
Adam Clayton Powell III, vice president for technology and programs at the Freedom Forum, quoted the cartoon when he was talking about the potential for online voting during a talk at Poptech 2000: Being Human in the Digital Age, a conference in late October in Camden, Me. In an e-mail interview, Mr. Powell said, ''The cartoon was the perfect one-line summary printed at just the right moment.'' Mr. Powell said it precisely described the Net's ambiguity. ''Assuming literacy in written English,'' he said, ''anyone in the world can get a Hotmail account and write to the president of M.I.T. -- or the president of the U.S. -- and who is to know he is really an 11-year-old in Mali?''
Mr. Steiner's own obscurity hasn't cost him, however. He and the magazine have split more than $100,000 in fees paid for reprinting and otherwise licensing the cartoon, with more than half going to Mr. Steiner, according to Mr. Mankoff, the cartoon editor.
''It's become an icon,'' Mr. Mankoff said. ''It provokes a response. It's chunked in memory.'' The original of the cartoon was sold before it became popular for a sum so small that he doesn't remember it, Mr. Steiner said.
William H. Gates's publisher came calling to use the panel in Mr. Gates's 1995 book, ''The Road Ahead.'' At the time, Mr. Steiner said, The New Yorker ''was not great at negotiating these fees.'' A magazine staff member and Mr. Gates's representative agreed on a fee of $200, Mr. Steiner said. He told the staff member that the $200 would be paid by ''the richest man in the world, who's going to publish a book that's going to sell a million copies,'' he said, but she answered, ''That's what we charge for a first book.''
When Mr. Steiner was asked if people would still be citing his cartoon in 50 years, he replied, ''Isn't that horrifying -- to think that's the thing I'll be remembered for?''
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 14, 2000, Section G, Page 8 of the National edition with the headline: Cartoon Captures Spirit of the Internet.