Janet Jackson’s nipple popped out the last time the Panthers made a Super Bowl

The Carolina Panthers are appearing in the Super Bowl for the second time in franchise history. The last time they made it to the biggest game in the NFL was in 2004, when they faced the New England Patriots. But if you’re not a die-hard Panthers fan, you probably forgot they played in (and lost) the Super Bowl that year. The likely reason for that is because of “Nipplegate,” the infamous halftime show that would act as a catalyst for how we as a culture consume our media.

For the uninitiated: at the end of that halftime show, where Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake sang a duet of the latter’s “Rock Your Body,” Timberlake ripped a piece of Jackson’s dress and exposed her breast on national television. The breast itself had a little shield that covered the nipple. As you can imagine, there was a lot of outrage.

ESPN and Gawker have amazing, in-depth features from 2014 about the aftermath that are worth reading. Basically, neither Jackson nor Timberlake ever want to talk about it again, and Jackson is likely still hurt that Timberlake (who gave clumsy comments about the controversy) never really stood up to defend her. Even now, Michael Powell, who was the FCC chairman at the time and was a lot harsher back then, thinks the whole thing shouldn’t have been that big of a deal (via ESPN):

“I think we’ve been removed from this long enough for me to tell you that I had to put my best version of outrage on that I could put on,” he says, shrugging his shoulders and rolling his eyes. “Part of it was surreal, right? Look, I think it was dumb to happen, and they knew the rules and were flirting with them, and my job is to enforce the rules, but, you know, really? This is what we’re gonna do?”

It’s still a huge event that lingers in the back of people’s minds -- almost 90 million minds, that is -- and it’s likely we will never have another incident like that ever again. There are reasons for why it changed the way we consume our media:

The video site that pretty much everyone in 2016 depends on to cure boredom was born because co-creator Jawed Karim wanted a way to make the footage easier to find (via ESPN):

As soon as [our children] hear about the time Janet Jackson’s breast was exposed on live TV, they’ll watch it online. And the reason they’ll watch it online is that in 2004, Jawed Karim, then a 25-year-old Silicon Valley whiz kid, decided he wanted to make it easier to find the Jackson clip and other in-demand videos. A year later, he and a couple of friends founded YouTube, the largest video-sharing site of all time.

You can still find the clip on YouTube in its uncensored state; perhaps in a few months, the NFL, CBS or MTV will try to take it down. And it will pop back up somewhere else -- maybe not on YouTube, but on Vimeo, Dailymotion or other video sharing sites that came about in the wake of YouTube’s success. It’s a vicious cycle of sharing content.

TiVo gained popularity because of “Nipplegate,” which makes sense considering that in 2004, TiVo was practically the only service whose main selling point was a replay function. These days, DVR is a main feature for cable, and replay exists in pretty much every video service, such as Netflix, the aforementioned YouTube, and even apps like Periscope and Snapchat (albeit for 24 hours). And in the extreme, Vine is currently a major conduit for sharing short-form videos, especially on social media platforms like Twitter.

We are currently a culture that tends to remix and reinterpret things, either through GIFs, Vines, elaborate YouTube videos or even ourselves. Regurgitating the media we consume in whatever format is inevitable, especially when it’s tied to a major event. This wasn’t really possible in 2004; most people didn’t use their computers to make things, and nowadays, a college kid with a Macbook and video editing software has the ability to make Drake dance with a tennis racket in Wii Sports.

But on the flip side -- the more depressing side -- given that the Internet has a continuous track record of treating women horribly, there’s no doubt that a second “Nipplegate”-like incident would garner much more terrible responses than it would if it was 2004. Even then, the gender politics that came into play meant Jackson unfortunately took most, if not all of the blame for the incident, while Timberlake came away unscathed, even gaining more success, while Jackson’s career suffered. Imagine that happening in 2016, with social media making it easier to bridge communication between strangers -- the amount of vitriol would be amplified, tenfold. What happened to Jackson after “Nipplegate” was disappointing; what would happen to a woman in a similar situation in 2016 would be downright horrifying. It’s a terrible consequence to consider these days, and no woman or man should ever go through that.

Twelve years may not seem like much of a gap (at least when compared to other championship gaps for other sports teams), but life really has changed dramatically since we last saw the Panthers in the Super Bowl. Our TV shows, our music, the way we listen to music, the way we spend our daily lives on the internet -- all of that has changed, mostly for the better.

When “Nipplegate” happened, I was 13 and I had missed it, which is strange to say out loud, because how could anyone in America miss it? I had no idea that it happened, until someone asked me about it the next day at school. Of course, being teenagers, no one was outraged; everyone thought it was kind of funny. And I was shocked that I had missed it -- as a teenage boy, why wouldn’t I be? Since I’d missed it live and I didn’t have TiVo, I had to settle for censored replays on national news and on gossip shows like Access Hollywood. There were no smartphones, advances in streaming video, advances in broadband internet and no apps that I could access if I wanted to see that footage.

Nowadays, we have so many ways of finding highlights on our computers and phones that it’d be hard to miss them. Whenever Cam Newton does a thing, I can check Twitter on my phone, search “Cam Newton did a thing” and see a three-second GIF for three loops, and then move on with my life. The 2004 me would freak the hell out if he saw what technology has become today; 2016 me sees this as routine.

I’m reminded of a blurb I read from -- I’m not kidding -- an announcement for Sufjan Stevens’ album Carrie & Lowell. The source may be left-field, but the content is relevant. It reads:

THESE ARE AGGRESSIVE TIMES. Each morning we awaken to a psychic blitz of breaking news, social outrage, and millions of images and voices shrieking look at me and this onslaught does not cease until late at night when the last glowing screen fades to black. This world demands our attention with one hand and destroys it with the other.

That right there is a striking contrast from a world where Frasier, Friends and The O.C. were still on air, and OutKast’s “Hey Ya” was a chart-topping hit. What a time to be alive.