So what is the new “is the new”?

Is the new
This is a pretty cool idea: map all the instances of “X is the new Y” in a set of documents and see how things interrelate. No mention of what the documents were, or what the arrow lengths mean, but it’s still fun to look at, and would be cool to replicate, esp. on a corpus of blog posts, marketing blurbs, or product reviews.

Via VisualComplexity

7 Responses to “So what is the new “is the new”?”

  1. k7lim says:

    i’m curious to see “X is Y 2.0″

    X->Y

  2. yiming says:

    “Supporting our troops is the new AIDS”. “Fat is the new climate change.” I was momentarily confused by the non-sequitors, but they do turn up actual articles with a Google feel lucky search. Interesting. I wonder how they get rid of false hits like “FooWidgetX is the new version of widget software from BarCorp”.

    One should be able to punch in “* is the new *” in Google and scrape all the matching phrases that are returned. Annoying that Google no longer exposes a decent search API.

  3. Tones says:

    I like the part where there are two instances of the number 30 with the connecting arrow pointing both ways.

  4. k7lim says:

    yiming: did google used to expose a better search API?

    does waybackmachine show it?

  5. Ziggity says:

    I saw this list (via kottke) a while ago . . . looks like he just Googled “is the new.”

    Yiming, I think they must go through and edit out the hits you describe. Though I hesitate to say this here, some things just can’t be programmed . . . yet.

  6. mcd says:

    I see on that list “cell phones are the new cigarettes,” a phrase I think often, have made some digiart about, and that will soon be the topic of my second post EVAR to the ‘loaf, a venue in which I am warming to the idea of sharing my Photoshoppian artistic vision.

  7. lisascenic says:

    A number of years ago, I really tried to find the first citation of “brown is the new black” and failed miserably. I wonder what I was procrastinating doing….

Leave a Reply