From the 1920s all the way through to the 1990s, each decade has - arguably - cultural characteristics and stereotypes that most of us can easily conjure:
20s & 30s: Girls with stylishly short hair, Betty Boop, prohibition, jazz
40s: The War and its aftermath
50s: Rock 'n Roll, sports jackets, big cars, things being in colour
60s: Hippies + new age stuff, The Beetles, the pill, rapidly liberalised attitudes towards sex & drugs
70s: Funk music, extravagant fashion
80s: Music with synthesisers, Reganomics, cocaine, “Greed is Good”, big hair
90s: Malaise, grunge music, MTV
(okay, a lot of the above is subjective and dependent upon how old you are are where you’re from, but you get the idea…)
But then we get to 2000…
I am at a loss about what to say about the 00s and the 10s. I couldn’t name a single defining feature or characteristic about either of them. Is this because…
a) They’re too recent, and we need more time before we can reminisce about them generically
b) It’s just me; everyone else can easily list stereotypes about both decades
c) It’s just that we’ve grown out of bunching together arbitrary periods of time (decades) and pretending that they each have distinct personalities
d) There is something about the way that society and culture has diverged and de-centralised over the past two decades that it has become more difficult to easily stereotype them.
e) ?
For the record, the blatant lying without repercussions was a return to how things were before 1940.
I think MTV was more of an 80s thing than 90s.
My daughter has mentioned that to a large degree fashion ended in the 90s. Decades did have a look to them to some degree and that has disappeared.
Adding to that, prior to cable being in more than half of the homes, a large segment of the population had the same basic reference via network TV or before than movies and radio. Above a certain age, you expect everyone to be aware of the Wizard of Oz as an example.
The Internet becoming extremely common by 2000 changed things. Then smart phones accelerated that.
We have to wait for the advertising designers take on the 2010’s, after a lot of collective conscious loss. According to them, the 1960’s was vagabond hippies in tie-dye headbands listening to Iron Butterfly. In reality it was people with jobs and mortgages in polyester listening to Al Hirt.
Decades do have defining characteristics. However, they often only applied to a minority of people. Many of whom were WEIRD. White. Educated. Industrialized Rich Democracy-born. For many, the decades differed less. Life did not always change that much (though did in the case of big events), though music and culture did.
The Noughts were a time of greatly increasing technology use, before its negative side was much known or discussed. Increasing individualism, more self-confidence, less empathy, greater polarization, more tribalism but also more global awareness and exposure to the exotic. The following decade much exaggerated these tendencies.
Oh lord… we’ve gone through this in great detail in previous threads. Your example D is closest to the mark about what the Dope thinks is going on.
One theory was that the rise of the internet changed how people communicate and consume information, and that means that stuff that was once universal is not so much anymore. For example “Game of Thrones” was a big deal- everyone watched it. Same with “Breaking Bad”. But that sort of everyone watching was far more the rule than the exception in say… 1988. For example, “Game of Thrones” pulled in viewership numbers that were similar to the top shows in 1988. Not genre-defining cultural event shows, but “The Cosby Show” and “Roseanne”. Those sorts of viewership numbers were normal for the top shows in a season, not anything special.
Radio worked much the same- if you weren’t getting mix tapes of underground bands or hearing about them from your friends who knew people, there was the radio. So there again, a LOT more commonality to what people listened to.
News was even more monolithic. You had your local paper(s) and maybe the WSJ or USA Today in print, you had the big 3 networks for broadcast news, and you had local/syndicated radio, much of which was still the big 3 networks’ radio version. So everyone heard the same news.
Books were similar as well- you had bookstores, and they were mostly supplied by the major publishers.
Now we’ve got all that, but we’ve also got all sorts of niche websites as well as digital platforms that give you far more choice and that don’t necessarily exclude small-time content producers- bands, authors, etc…
The upshot is that now people can tailor whatever they’re consuming to their own tastes far more than they could, and that translates into a lot less of a common experience than in the past, and that means that decade-defining trends aren’t common any more, so we can’t easily distinguish say… 2005 from today in terms of fashion, media, music, etc…
My guesses: the Oughts will be remembered for terrorism and the mindless patriotism and xenophobia it nurtured. The 2010s will go down as the “Facebook Decade” and the way social media spurred mass hysteria and conspiracy theories. And thanks to the pandemic, the 2020s will be the nesting/TV binging decade. Some will look back at this decade nostalgically as one of comfort and security and some (mostly young people) will remember it as a decade of isolation and cheated opportunities.
This. Although I think a big part of the debate is what exactly is being debated. Many of the responses in previous threads seemed to be debating two separate aspects of the issue. I’ll take four different areas (which by all means aren’t the only areas that can be considered) into consideration.
Music. What we season to vs. how we listen to it. IMHO the actual music hasn’t changed much since around 1999, despite a CD - MP3 / iPod - streaming changes taking place.
Movies and TV shows. Again, the actual type of shows* haven’t changed much since the late 1990s, despite the change from cable to DVD to streaming.
Clothing. The actual clothing style has again seemed to be stable since the late 1990s, despite the change in physical shopping at a mall to ordering online.
Hairstyles. Again, the actual styles seem relatively stable since the late 90s, even though now we check in online instead of calling ahead or just showing up in person to the barbershop / salon.
Here’s another way to think about, in terms of the superficial characteristics. Let’s picture a time traveler and whether or not they would seem out of place based on things like how they are dressed, what music they listen to, what they watch, their hairstyle, etc. The “squares” attending a Bill Haley & The Comets concert in 1955 would obviously look and feel out of place at Woodstock in 1969. Those hippies at Woodstock in 1969 would also likely look and feel out of place at a disco in the late 1970s. Those people at the disco in 1979 would look and feel out of place hanging with a bunch of teenagers watching MTV in 1988 or in the mosh pit at a Metallica concert. Those 1988 teenagers watching MTV and banging heads in the mosh pit would be out of place with the teeny boppers at a Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, or Backstreet Boys concert in 1999. But those 1999 kids would probably be right at home swapping 1999 Britney Spears for 2022 Britney Spears, swapping the Backstreet Boys for Ed Sheehan or Harry Styles, Dr. Dre for Drake, and Christina Aguilera for Ariana Grande. The differences in how they dress and their hairstyles are also the least likely to be radically different.
*. I’m talking about the style of the shows and movies, not things like greater cultural acceptance of minorities and how that is portrayed.
I was young, but I remember the end of the Soviet Union, and Francis Fukuyama’s about “The End of History.” And then the Aughts (take note of the spelling, everybody) came along with 9/11, and suddenly we realized that maybe history isn’t finished with us yet. During most of the 90’s, it seemed like we took a break from history, and then the 00’s reversed that.
So that and terrorism would be the defining characteristics of the 00’s.
A recent movie, Rebel Wilson’s Senior Year, seems to me to support my opinion.
It’s about a high school senior in 1999 who falls into a coma and wakes up in 2022. Yes, she has some overall societal changes to get used to, but there weren’t any “What is this new music I’ve never heard before?” or “These clothes are so strange” or “What’s up with all these new fangled hairstyles?” moments. The closest was a same style with a new name when she saw an article about Lady Gaga and asked if that was (presumably late 90s era version) Madonna. In other words the names and faces are different, but the music and style are the same. When she put on a cheerleading show at a school function, there was some shock about having such a function, but playing a 1999 Britney Spears song to accompany the show that didn’t seem retro to a 2022 audience wasn’t part of that shock.
This topic has come up before a number of times (though I can’t be arsed to try to find and link the other times).
My answer remains that No, there isn’t a clear feel to the noughts or the tens, and probably won’t be for future decades. Because things are too fast-moving and too fragmented. Blame it on fast fashion and TV and music streaming.
I think the changes are still occurring- if you look at say… 2002 and today, things are different but not so dramatically as say… 1975-1985. Where the changes are dramatic is in how younger people interact with the world. Social media is a much bigger thing to younger people than to middle-aged and older people.
I suspect that when they look back, they’ll define their time periods by social media platforms and/or smartphone apps, not by music, fashion and TV like we did.
But, in the '90s, MTV was still a definitional thing for U.S. culture, though it was through animated shows like Beavis and Butt-Head and Daria, and The Real World, which was one of the big early reality-TV shows.
That sounds like a good prediction to me. The Facebook era, then the TikTok era, and who knows what else to follow. As mentioned above, the fragmentation caused by social media coming to dominance is probably why the superficial stuff seems tot have stagnated. Back in the day “everyone” watched the series finale of MASH, or listened to the Elvis in the 50s, the Beatles in the 60s, the Beegees in the 70s, and so on. Now the increased number of options means that no one new change can take hold and become dominant. Instead we’re still cruising along with the styles that happened to be dominant in 1999.
Forget about 10 years. Even 3 years was enough back in the day. I still remember quite clearly how all the kids in my freshman year of high school (the 1991-1992 academic year) looked at me strange because I was still into Rick Astley, Tiffany, and Debbie Gibson (who had their peak in 1988 and 1989) while they were all listening to alternative music. A mere 3 years had passed and already my taste in music was hopelessly outdated. I doubt today’s high school freshman would get grief for liking music from 2002.
This was another change I remember quite well from when I started high school. Enjoying music videos was no longer cool. It was all about Beavis and Butt-Head, even though the titular characters themselves were all about music videos.
I think there is some ‘d)’ involved. I was rewatching ‘The X Files’ last year, and, especially when they got to a season where they started routinely using cell phones (s.3?) I remember thinking, this show doesn’t really seem that dated at all, despite the fact that it’s over 20 years old.
Contrast that with a show like ‘Happy Days’; a show first taking place in the late 70s that was about the late 50s. The 50s seemed like a hundred years ago. Granted, I was just a kid then, but i bet adults watching the show felt more or less the same.
