I don’t think we’re “stuck in the 90s” overall. As others have pointed out, the changes represented by cell phones and the Internet alone are too big to ignore.
That said, I think the pace of change in music, fashion, and pop culture has been rather slow since around 1994 (the earlier 90s were indeed an extension of the 80s).
As a society, we seem to have settled on some core styles that don’t change very much. Some ill-advised trends like whale tails come and go, but the core remains.
In music, I think there is very little today that would seem mind-blowing to someone in 1994. Imagine a game in which you play “the most advanced music of the future” and try to get someone to say “whoa.” What would it be? OTOH, take the same music back to 1974, and it would be very easy to do.
I think the one trend in pop culture that could blow people’s minds is big money now spent on TV shows. That is more advanced and different than 90s stuff, for the most part, but it is only a few shows. Standard sitcoms are the same crap.
We had a 25-year time capsule dug up in a local mall a couple of years ago, and the event was rather ho-hum. Watching the items come out, I kept wondering what the people of 1988 thought we would say:
“Oh, look. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Those were so big, then disappeared”
“Wow, a U2 record! I wonder if they’re still together?”
“God, whatever happened to that Spielberg guy? Remember “Raiders of the Lost Ark”? They don’t make them like that anymore.”
“Man, I’m sure glad that rap and hip-hop disappeared!”
So while today isn’t completely like the '90s, it’s not totally different either.
Made me laugh!!! Even the late eighties are not really that different. Funny because TMNT are still somewhat popular and very well remembered, U2 are still around and very successful, there was a new Indiana Jones movie just a few years ago and rap is still extremely popular.
I’ve walked the streets in this video countless times and in the mid/late 2000s it still looked extremely similar to this. Some of the businesses are different but like, I’ve eaten at that Burger King at least a dozen times.
That’s actually an interesting way to look at it… perhaps the changes from the early 90s through now have been additions of new things (internet and cell phone stuff, for the most part) but not so much dying out of old things. So someone travelling back in time from now to 1990 would recognize most of what was going on, but would miss Google and Facebook, as opposed to someone travelling back then and seeing lots of things that were obviously and immediately unfamiliar.
Or perhaps not. Maybe 25-year-time-capsules are just always anticlimactic. But I feel like one buried in 1970 and opened in 1995 would have been more full of clear anachronisms.
“Oh wow, a CD. My dad still uses those.”
“VHS? How are we supposed to play this?”
“Oh, is that a smartphone? Nope. We called those PDAs.”
“What’s this? A big CD? No, I think they called those Laserdiscs.”
“What’s with those huge pants? Well, there was this guy called MC Hammer…”
“Is this a tie dye shirt? Nah, it’s something called Hypercolor. Big in the 90s.”
“Strip of metal in a cloth band? Looks dangerous. Slap bracelet.”
“Remember Alf?”
“Are these mini coasters? They’re called POGs.”
And so on.
Anachronisms abound. Sure, if you focus on the stuff that hasn’t changed so much, things will look the same. But if you look at the stuff that’s just really different, not so much. That’s tautological, but it seems to happen a lot with these 90s threads.
It’s also a bit of selective amnesia. There are things we associate with the 70s that are very different from today. The things from the 90s that are really different aren’t associated with the decade so much, at least in pop culture memory. It’s also tautological, but we don’t remember the stuff we forget. And a lot of 90s culture just isn’t remembered very well.
Hell rape is probably considered worse than murder these days, but I think that has as much to do with patronizing neo-Victorian ideas about chastity and innocence as it does with feminism.
I think one of the major differences from then and now is the larger diversity of body types seen on actresses and models. IIRC it used to bt pretty much one look, one body type that every girl and woman was obsessed with - thin, thin , thin. I’m glad people have loosened up about that.
This is what I referring to when I mentioned accretive culture. Part of what people are identifying as a lack of cultural change is actually a sign of a fundamental cultural change. The Internet Age has had a profound and pervasive effect on the way culture progresses, because the Internet never forgets.
Take music. Even in the period since recording technology became available, most music has been largely transitory. When it was new, it was on the radio for a while. You might have heard a particular piece if you happened to be tuned in to the right station at the right time, and you might or might not have ever learned its title or artist. After a while, it largely vanished from collective awareness, remaining chiefly as vinyl fossils in someone else’s collection. If you didn’t happen to hear it during that brief window, you had probably missed your chance to be exposed to it.
Today, music is more accessible than it has ever been, and even obscure pieces don’t die completely. If you hear even a snippet of a piece, you can find out everything about it, usually in minutes, and there are many more ways to encounter music now–obvious examples are things like Pandora, YouTube, and video games. You can easily wander into genres you never even considered, and explore them in depth. In the modern musical environment, people have the entire history of recorded music at their fingertips; recent music really has a relatively small edge in impinging on most individuals’ awareness. One popular game or viral video can expose millions of people to a genre of music that fell out of style nearly a century ago, and some percentage of them will like it, and seek out more. Why wouldn’t people choose from the full menu, rather than just the catch of the day? Having chosen, if they happen to be musicians themselves, why would they not be influenced by what they like?
It goes well beyond music, especially with the expansion of online shopping and custom manufacture. A niche that would have been unsustainable 20 years ago can be a viable business now, because the online market allows people in that niche to find businesses that cater to them. Custom manufacture (tshirts are easy for this, but 3D printing is making inroads here) means that as long as something is remembered, new things can be made of it…and the Internet never forgets.
Things don’t go away anymore; they get absorbed into the cultural lexicon. As the lexicon grows, culture becomes less monolithic, with people picking and choosing whichever pieces they feel fit them. The old and the new coexist, and it’s up to the individual build their personal culture out of this new wealth of choices.
And I think another aspect of the Internet’s influence is to support the existence of core fashions that don’t go away.
Paradoxically, the “long tail effect” can help support a strong core. The reason is that people can satisfy their desire to be different as individuals and connect with others who have that interest: in effect, there is a release valve. For example, if people dress up Goth or Hipster or Steampunk or whatever, that is seen as a hobby and not as a fashion trend (well, maybe Hipster is), and the people dressing that way may not even dress that way all the time.
Since there are these release valves, outlier fashions do not sweep the entire populace. Example: leisure suits in the 70s.
I think 20 years from now, we’re going to be seeing khakis and polos and really nothing’s going to be all that crazy.
Arguably that had already mostly happened by the early 1990s. That’s not to say that, then as now, there weren’t plenty of rock and roll bands out there, but they were no longer the central focus of popular music.
As a matter of fact, hard rock stopped being anything like the central focus probably by the mid-1970s, when “soft rock” and singer-songwriters like James Taylor began to over the AM dial.
[ol]
[li]It’s difficult to find a payphone…anywhere - Payphones were the cell phones of the 1990s and earlier.[/li][li]I can go into my GROCERY store (not department store) and buy items which I would have to get from a department or speciality store before - These include cell phones, digital cameras, gift cards (not for the store), gourmet foods (including sushi),hardware, gourmet PET FOOD,DVDs,etc.[/li][li]I rarely see people use maps anymore - The map was teh “GPS” of teh 1990s and earlier.[/li][li]Electronics which were either unavailable or would have costs me thousands can be purchased less for than $500 USD - I remember in teh 90s when laptops cost between $3k-6k USD and they had less memory than current smart phone. Now If I pay $3-6k for a laptop, I could literally run a space program from it.[/li][li]**Nostalgia still existed in the 1990s **- Now, in 2014, if want, I can watch or own entire series of television programs for less than $100 USD. They will be in higher quality video than theyw ere filmed in originally; and I watch them whenever I want almost wherever I want to do so. I don’t have to wait for reruns on TV; I can program my DVR to save shows for years (or forever) and watch them when I want to. I don’t have to remember how something was, I can SEE IT whenever I want to.[/li][li]I can own every single song that I have ever heard in my entire life - I can either pay for them, stream them online for low cost or free or pirate them in high quality audio. I’m talking about the the entire discography of every major and most minor recording artists who have ever LIVED. To do this in the 1990s would have been impossible for anyone but a diehard collector or an exceptionally wealthy person.[/li][li]I can record my entire life if choose to on a video recording device which I can carry around in my hand and which will cost me less than $500 at most - My entire life can then be uploaded onto the Internet for the entire world to see if I so choose.[/li][/ol]
As far as fashion, at least among teens, the sagged pants look seems to be dead. Skinny jeans and snapback caps are in, along with the preppy look (paradoxically among many rap fans) and the hipster, nerdy look for rock fans. If I see someone with the big white tshirt and saggy jeans look, it is usually on a 30-40 year old guy with a goatee who still keeps up with Fred Durst. He is the modern equivalent of a guy in the 1990s who blasted ZZ Top and Skynyrd cassettes in his old Camaro.
Recently I saw some pictures from 1994 of my high school friends, and it hit me how dated we looked…a lot of polo shirts and stripes, some of both sexes with the open flannel shirt over a tshirt look, a lot of light blue denim jeans (and no shame with a matching denim jacket), guys with fade haircuts with longish/shaggy hair on top, or lingering mullet-like haircuts, girls with “rachel” cuts or frizzy late 80’s hair. Until I saw these photos, I would think I dressed the same as I did 20 years ago, or that fashion has barely changed.
I remember jokes being made about anyone who’d be so ostentatious as to use their cell phone, when they happened to be standing next to a bank of payphones. Because, you see, the cell call was always so much more expensive than what it would have cost to use the payphone. Come to think of it, people continued to joke about this well past the point when the underlying premise was no longer true.
Whereas before one was considered a freak with a family-destroying delusion, today (most) people realize gender identity is determined NOT between your legs, but between your ears.
"What is it with Millennials and ear buds? Do they have a hearing aid fetish? And why do they think the best way to interact with a computer is to touch the screen? I mean, everybody has a cortical shunt - everybody! Why touch the damn screen when all you have to do is think ‘I’d sure like some coffee in 10 minutes’, but noooo… when I go to my mom’s house, it’s swipe this, press that, and double-tap the other thing.
But… it was still better than Grandpa, who did nothing but type on his computer all day!"
