I don’t think anybody was saying it was a fad (although I think the popularity and ubiquity of it in the 00s is “faddish”, depending on your definition of the word.) I was going to bring up Cops and Real World (especially) in my cultural encapsulation of the 90s, but reality TV really comes into its own in the 00s, and that’s the decade I associate with it. I feel like it’s on the wane in the 2010s, but I may be wrong about that.
Another interesting thing to me, and maybe I’m just making this up, but it seems to me that Indians and Indian-Americans (as in South Asia) have become increasingly represented and visible in pop culture in the late 00s and early 10s.
Right, but the thread is asking for the difference between the 2000s and the 2010s. Reality TV became mainstream in the 2000s and is still there in the 2010s. Other people have dragged the differences between the 90s and 2000s into it, but bump was strictly comparing 2003 and 2013.
Not your imagination. Outsourced, Mindy Kahling, the entire career of Kal Penn… And that’s just off the top of my head.
in 2003 the war on terror was just starting, in 2013 it is ending. obl is dead, the Iraq war is over and the afghan war is ending.
I think our pov of World events is different now due to it. global poverty, the rise of Chinap etc are supplanting fighting muslim extremists as our foreign policy.
aside from that, cooler phones but not much else. cultural egalitarianism was inevitable imo so lgbt rights being more accepted is not unusual.
I think the biggest difference between the 00’s and the 10’s is the ubiquity of Facebook and the iPhone (and their competitors, which wouldn’t have come about if they weren’t billion-dollar ideas worth competing with).
In the 00s you had your MySpace - that silly, ugly, glitter site for kids - and your dumb phones or your phones with keyboards. If you had a phone that had some Internet access, it was nightmarishly slow. You also had to find a separate pocket for your iPod because it was a completely different tool than your phone, but everyone had an iPod.
Now you have your tidy Facebook or Google+ (or nothing at all - which was how you were in the era of MySpace too), and a fast, reliable, wi-fi connectable phone/computer/music player in the form of a smartphone (or not, which, whatever (I don’t have one either)).
2003 seems EONS away when I’m lying in bed checking Facebook on my Touch (close enough to an iPhone).
I know some people who don’t hardly ever touch a computer anymore. They do all of their internetting on their phone. That would have been inconceivable in 2009. (ok maybe more like 2007)
I’ll always remember the 00’s as the War On Terror decade. It seems that almost every time I turned on the TV, there was Bush announcing progress in the War On Terror. Most of the news was about Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.
I think 2003 is closer to 2013 than to 1993. In 2003, everyone was going online, buying things on Ebay, getting computer training for jobs, and using portable phones. In 1993, most people shopped at local brick and mortar stores, bought music CDs and used payphones while away from home. The first Iraq war was over very quickly, there was no looming fear of terror, and airline travel was much less of a hassle.
Depends on your metric and your own personal habits. In 2003, it was still by far the norm for me to go to brick-and-mortars. In 2003 I was going to actual bookstores to buy books. CD stores to buy music. Camera stores to buy cameras. All like I did in 1993. I was even still shooting film, as a professional photographer, just like in 1993. To me, today in 2013, all that is long past. I’ve shot two rolls of film in the last five years. I can’t remember the last time I actual was inside a bookstore. I can’t even remember the last CD I bought, but it’s been at least 5 years since I’ve bought one. And I can’t imagine living without a cell phone, whereas in 2003, that was still a plausible way to live (and a good number of my friends were still cell-phone less.)
Agreed. In 2003 you would still think of “owning” media - you bought an album or a film and you kept it. Now, you can pretty much take it for granted that if you want to listen to or watch something, you can access it online, by fair means or foul, pretty well instantly. We no longer own media physically, we just access it when we want it. (Albeit we’re not quite there yet, as I frequently discover when trying to stream music from iTunes Match on the move…)
I’m a Millennial and I thank God everyday that I graduate just before Myspace became ubiquitous. I can’t imagine having to go to school while having to deal with social networks.
To be honest, I’m having trouble figuring out the difference between 90s Gen-X slackers and 2000s Gen-Y hipsters. Except we (Gen-X) dressed like lumberjacks and they dress like…I don’t know…whoever wears hoodies.
I think it has more to do with people holding a particular nostalgia for music they first heard in their teens and 20s. I don’t know anyone who likes music who just stopped listening to music made after they turned 25. The difference is I may like the new Fall Out Boy song (or whoever the kids listen to these days) because I like that sound. But I’m not like “wow that really speaks to me and my generation!” like I may have been as a 19 year old listening to Green Day’s Dookie.
“I hear everybody that you know…is more relevant…than everybody that I know.”
-Losing My Edge, LCD Soundsystem
For many people that’s true. It’s even true for me in a way, but completely opposite in the specifics. I was in my early 20s when I heard Longview and I thought it was pretty cool, but it didn’t speak to me.
Whereas 2000s pop punk/emo speaks to me more than 1990s popular alternative. But it’s because the 2000s-alt reminds me of college rock from the early 1990s, when I was around 18: a lot of the music shares the melodicity and singing style, (if the earlier stuff lacks the polishedness and pop sensibility.)
I think the mood in the US has considerably lightened this decade. After a carefree '90s, the 2000’s started with the hugely divisive election of George W Bush and the September 11 attacks, both of which cast very long shadows. It was in many ways a sad decade: angry politics, two escalating wars, a financial meltdown. People make a big deal over the backlash Obama faces, but IMHO it’s nothing compared to the bitterness of the Bush years. When I think back on that decade I picture marches and war protests and devastation in Iraq and anthrax and the flooding of New Orleans and the bombings in London and Spain and Bali…
In comparison, in this decade we’ve seen the Iraq War end, the Afghanistan War rapidly following suit, a comparatively mild presidential election, a president who is popular on the world stage, a tentative economic recovery… It all feels rather easier and lighter than the rough times of the preceding decade.
It is good to paint anything you can in a positive light but I don’t get the overall sense that things are A-OK even with scattered good news. Economic news is bleak on its own and has already affected every generation rapidly in those years from destroying the Baby Boomers retirement dreams to forcing young people to study something in college that has an actual practical purpose rather than an intellectual one. Even standby professions like law that use to have excellent job and income prospects for liberal types at one time have been greatly affected.
The U.S. is still doing fairly well compared to some countries in Europe but that is a backhanded compliment. The future is quite uncertain for the first time since the end of the Great Depression and the official numbers for things like the unemployment rate have carefully massaged so that they don’t truly reflect the number of people greatly impacted.
I landed in a great industry to weather this storm but the mood is that you have to perform well all the time or get out and give the job to one of the hundreds of others that would kill for it. It wasn’t that way at all 10 - 15 years ago. Young people today are making lifelong choices that are quite different than earlier generations because they know you can’t count on any one thing for long. That isn’t always a bad thing but the bunker mentality is there.
2003/2013 are different for me, but not all that different. I had a cell phone in 2003, now it does more stuff. I had a computer in 2003, now it has more stuff on it. I don’t see a huge difference in fashion–what normal people wear to work could be pretty much the same, although it seems to me there is more cleavage than there used to be (say, at the bank).
But weirdly enough my son (17) and I watched a movie that came out the year he was born, and it didn’t seem outdated at all. He thought it was too much of a chick-flick for him, but he also laughed, he thought high school as represented in the movies then was pretty similar to high school as experienced by him now, and the male fashions were virtually indistinguishable. (I think Cher’s wardrobe would have been considered OTT even the year the movie came out. At least by me.) (Possibly Denver is just that far behind the times.)
When I was growing up we’d look at fashions from 10 years before and laugh and wonder how they could wear that. How could they think that looked good? Ten years later we were saying that about ourselves–how could we have worn that, how could we think that looked good? I don’t think that much has changed in the last ten years. Clothes and fashions from 10 years ago, unless they were extreme, are just not that different.
But: now it seems to me like we have always been at war. In 2003 it seemed like we hadn’t been at war for a long time. That was a better feeling IMO.
I do remember one joke in Clueless that probably doesn’t translate the way it was intended anymore. A cellphone rings in class, and lots of girls go rummaging in their bags to see if it’s their phone.
The jokes were:
Only rich girls have cellphones with them at school.
All ringtones were the same on the same brand phone.
Now everyone has phones everywhere and ringtones are designed to differentiate, of course.
Although there were outliers such as yourself, many, if not most, people were converting over to shopping online, using email and cell phones by 2003. Most popular websites such as Amazon and Google were formed and had a sizable user base by 2003. People were getting their news online by 2003. The changes that came after, such as using Facebook instead of MySpace and smart phones instead of cell phones, are not as monumental.
Clueless’s prescience is uncanny though. That initially was a joke on our presumed social betters but the joke is and was on all of us ultimately. Even with differentiated ring tones that happens all the time.
Err, why? Facebook and other social media sites are popular for a reason. They make organizing events, meeting between friends, and so forth a lot easier. I was in second year at university when one of my friends told me about Facebook. It was pretty obvious as soon as you signed up it was going to be big as it was such an improvement on what had come before it.
Hmmm. I was born in 1990 and I don’t find the fashions in Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to look that dated. I mean, they do look eighties, but the characters don’t dress nearly as outrageously as say your typical 80s music video.
I find that with some films like Garden State, Love and Other Drugs, and..welll…Donnie Darko, you really can’t tell what decade they are supposed to take place by the way the characters are dressed. Really the only way you know what decade it is because they are playing The Shins, Spin Doctors or Tears for Fears in the background.