Think about some of the most shocking events of the last century - you’d probably be inclined to remember where you were when you first saw it, or if you saw it at all, but you probably wouldn’t think about how you saw it. The same can’t be said about “The Dress.” Black and Blue or White and Gold, a simple trick of lighting divided the internet into two distinct camps (#teamwhiteandgold or #teamblueandblack?) and drove people to madness in the process.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the dress is how its internet stardom caught everyone completely off-guard. In the deep darkness of a February night winter quarter, I returned to my Willard dorm room to hide from the world, but found my spirits lifted by the absolute absurdity of that very world. A quick skim of the trending topics online proved that everyone was freaking out – over a dress?

To try and place the dress in the context of 2015 pop culture is a fool’s endeavor. I could say that that same night I sat in a nearly empty theater in Evanston and watched 50 Shades of Grey, or that the government was primed to vote on net neutrality, but neither give adequate rationale for the media frenzy that followed the visual misinterpretation of one dress as the other. (For the record, I first saw it as black and blue but later saw it as white and gold).

The dress is all too indicative of the state of the 24-hour news cycle. How is it possible that we truly ran out of anything important enough to talk about that we resorted to a dress that requires basic knowledge of Photoshop to decode. And yes, there’s science behind why we perceive the dress in the color we do and maybe staring at the dress again has made me impossibly frustrated as to how I simply cannot see it in white and gold, but the true story behind the dress is an underdog story. That a simple Tumblr post could nearly break the internet more successfully than any Kardashian is a testament to the growing egalitarianism of the web. Despite our best efforts to brush this bizarre moment in human history aside, 2015 will be remembered as a year when we let a dress that looks like it came from a Wet Seal 99 cent bin dominate the news for a day, then later dredged it back into relevance for the sake of a Halloween costume. And, in case you’re wondering, it’s blue and black.