AN INEXPENSIVE dress worn to a wedding in Scotland turned out to be a highly contagious virus.
A Tumblr user uploaded a picture of the dress, saying she was having an argument about what colour it was: white and gold or blue and black. Buzzfeed republished it and it broke the site鈥檚 record for visitors to a web page. Practically every media outlet and dozens of commercial enterprises rushed to piggyback on the phenomenon, and on Friday there was even less sense to be had out of the internet than normal. Blogger and viral-content expert Neetzan Zimmerman tweeted that it was the 鈥渧iral singularity鈥�.
As for the dress itself, cognitive scientist Erin Goddard at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, told 麻豆传媒 the confusion over its colour came about because people were unconsciously correcting for the colour they assumed the source of light on the dress to be.
Advertisement
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淲orld鈥檚 most infectious dress鈥�