Well, I was living in Hawaii in the early 1990s, and we did worry about shark attacks.
It wasn’t that great for those who aren’t like the average whip-smart SDMB’r. It was the decade of the dead-end service sector McJob, decline and irrelevance of union membership, the real estate boom left the people at the bottom living in dumps. Clinton was the emergent type of Democrat: one who cultivated the elites and championed the lower class with no more than platitudes. People were kicked off welfare, and the jobs they should have taken were being moved overseas.
This was the decade that created more millionaires and billionaires than any previous. And if you were poor it was your own fault.
Yes, the 90s are over. I recently watched several seasons of a few 90s era TV shows. It had a very time capsule like feel to it.
I recommend that to anybody who thinks the zeitgeist of the 90s was relevant until recently. Just watching some TV of that era disabuses you of that notion very quickly.
Maybe just watch some SNL episodes through the decade. That’s not going to capture the full flavor of the decade, but it will certainly demonstrate clearly how different things actually were. Even by 2005, things were significantly different, much less 2015.
Well said GREAT ANTIBOB, that decade is gone. Heck the 2000’s are gone as we know it.
Exactly. People think the 80s was the decade of greed but the 90s is really when it kicked into overdrive.
Is that .com or .org?
While I think the “90s” in the U.S. definitely ended with events like the contested election of George W. Bush and 9/11, it does not help that the decades since have no easily agreed on names (the 00s? the teens?) or many other features that conjure the same firm images that the fifties, sixties, and seventies do in popular culture.
I also don’t know what the turning points between the 00s and 10s are, aside from the 2008 economic crash and election of Barack Obama? - both not really in the 10s…
Well yes and no.
Sure, the plot in like 90% of episodes of Seinfeld or Friends could have been resolved in 30 seconds had they had smartphones.
OTOH, other than background music and clothing styles, I don’t think Friends is materially different from How I Met Your Mother (late 2000s) or New Girl (2010s). All those shows deal with the same issues of a bunch of 20 - 30 somethings living together in New York and transitioning into adulthood.
Prior to Friends, you just didn’t have that. I don’t think people in the 80s and earlier had these periods of extended post-college adolescence in their 20s where they bounced around various jobs and relationships and created a surrogate family with their friends and roommates.
But IMHO, the 90s definitely ended in 2001 with the combination of 9/11, the dot com bubble bursting and the collapse of Big 5 accounting firm Arthur Andersen. All the optimism of the late 90s was gone and all the angst of the early 90s seemed stupid and overblown in retrospect as now we had real problems.
And I would say the 2000s ended in 2008 with the financial crisis, as that has set the tone for everything since. And of course that tone is “now you see how much worse things can get”.
But I will propose this. The past 30 decades probably feel like the 90s never truly ended because they are all part of the same phase in American history. 1945 through 1989 were shaped by the events following the end of WWII. The defining driver being the ideological conflict between the Soviet Union and the West. All that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Everything since then has been defined by America’s role as the lone military and economic superpower and how that is not a condition that can stay at equilibrium indefinitely.
I’ve been watching Fresh Off The Boat (which is about a family moving to Orlando in 1995) and it is almost eerily accurate; I moved to Orlando in 1996 as a teen and the show does an amazing job of recreating the feel of the place and the time.
I agree with most of your post, but I do recall single people in their 20’s hanging out with friends and roommates in the 1970’s and 80’s. It just wasn’t a common sitcom theme until the 90’s (although there was the Mary Tyler Moore Show and the Odd Couple in the early 70’s).
I have to disagree.
This is where I sincerely urge people who make that argument to sit and watch multiple episodes in a single sitting.
The number of gay panic jokes alone will sometimes be striking. How women are treated another. If there’s anything about world politics or affairs, yet again different. Ditto economic optimism.
“Friends”, in particular, would be a strange beast as it lasted just over a decade all the way to 2004, so many of these changes would have been an organic part of the show itself.
If you mean basic plot points, well, you have me there, but the basic plots of several episodes wouldn’t be strange to viewers from the 50s much less today. With the exception of the size and gender of the cast, “Friends” isn’t really much different from a “Perfect Strangers” or “The Odd Couple”. Maybe even “Three’s Company” if you stretch. The devil really is in the details, and the different social cues show up but not always on a casual viewing of a few minutes or even of certain individual episodes.
It’s possible to have a large “macro” era with smaller micro-eras inside it. Whether the fall of Communism in 1989-91 signalled the beginning of a macro-era probably has to be left to future historians, but there are precedents. People often think of the period from 1945 to the mid-60s as an overall era (“the 50s”, roughly speaking), even though there were significant shifts in culture back then, too, as any comparison of Billboard singles charts from 1947 and 1962 will make apparent.
Since I’m usually immersed in the popular culture of much earlier decades, the products of the 1990s seem (to me) different in certain degrees (presence of mobile phones et al.) rather than fundamental kinds. One observation I have made, though, is that far more people are religiously unaffiliated now than were in 1990. Being openly atheist is more socially acceptable in many quarters, and the influence of mainline Protestantism has continued to decline. (See: http://http://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/19/event-transcript-religion-trends-in-the-u-s/)