Remember seeing the "Nintendo 64 kid" video in the age before video was commonplace? It was the stuff of legends. I remember watching it for the first time and thinking "Dang the kid is crazy." It scared me at first, seeing so much raw emotion in action, completely unrestrained. Then I got nostalgic about being a kid. And then I went out to lick streetlights.
Man, people held on to every last particle of entertainment even then. As recently as five or maybe four years ago, we'd discuss in minute detail, on IRC, the particular wild-eyed stare of the guy going "STFU noobs" in the
Attention Whore animation. (Which doesn't play for me at the moment.
)
So yeah, I'm blaming Youtube and its relentless flood of ten hours of video per second for the decline of today's society. Surely correlation equals causation.