Is cultural change speeding up or slowing down?

Great Debates
1

I would argue that pop culture has slowed down compared to the Cold War where every decade or so you got a totally new style. Since 1990 cultural change has been very gradual, and certain things have remained stagnant (for example, sagging your pants has been considered a hip thing to some for the entirety of the past 30 years).

I find it hard to imagine that 2050 will be super different from today. I bet you 3 decades from now rap will still be the music of the youth, smartphones and the Internet will be similar to how they are now with only modest improvements, China will still be an autocracy, Africa will still be poor, and the rest of the world will still be predominately a mix of capitalism and flawed democracy. Life expectancy will probably still be about 80 years. I think the world when I’m old will be similar to the world of my youth, and that kind of saddens me in a way, since people 30 years older than me got to see a huge amount of change in their lifetimes.

The world will be hotter though, that’s almost for sure.

2

Culture is what humans do; technology is how we do it. Changing technologies haul culture along in weird directions. The wildest SciFi speculations can barely prepare us for where we’re blindly rushing. Think of 1950’s forecasts of life in the early 2000’s. Ha.

So, my answer: Speeding crazily.

3

What changes are you talking about? Cultural, fashion, technological?

I agree, fashion doesn’t change as fast from what I can tell. The 50s vs 60s vs 70s vs 80s vs 90s changed. I don’t think fashion changes at the same rate. Not sure why but it doesn’t.

No idea how much technology will change. I’m guessing something other than smartphones though, since smartphones are really only about a decade old. I’m guessing we will have something akin to a voice controlled AI assistant instead that can predict our wants and needs before we have to tell it.

4

In the early 1990s, cell phones were for specialized occupations and rich people, and pagers were not uncommon for people who wanted mobile communication but couldn’t afford a cell. By the late 1990s, cell phones got smaller and better and added texting, and became more common, but still a novelty. By the early 2000s, cell phones and texting improved to the point that pagers became an anachronism and cell phones were not unusual. In the 2010s, smart phones became common and outside of certain demographic groups it’s pretty standard for everyone to have a cell phone. Meanwhile land lines are dying out, in 2015 more households had at least one cell phone than had a land line. This isn’t just ‘oh the device is a little different’, this means that now when you call a number you expect it to go to a particular person instead of a house, that you can make plans on the fly in a way you couldn’t when you could always call people at home, and that you can get information about things like event times and prices on the go instead of looking them up in a newspaper.

In the early 1990s, the internet was a weird academic thing and ‘going online’ meant dial-up services like local BBSs or the national ones like Compuserve and AOL. When the WWW was invented and email hit popular consciousness in the mid-90s, dial up internet became more common, and big companies began to feel compelled to have a web site of some sort. Through the 2000s, this grew - by the late 2000s it was not weird for a singe guy who does yard work to have his own web site, and social media sites started to take off. And access grew, with more and more mobile data and easy-to-find wifi (when was the last time you stayed at a hotel in a 100k+ city that didn’t have wifi?), and people using more laptops, tablets, and phones than desktop PCs. Through the 2010s the landscape of social media has been changing rapidly (death of myspace, backseating of facebook, rise of twitter, snapchat, etc) and has moved from something that techies and kids do to something ubiquitous. I’m not sure why you would expect smartphones and the internet to stay like they are now in 30 years when they weren’t even around 30 years ago.

In the 1990s, gay marriage was some radical left-wing nonsense and being any flavor of ‘not straight’ was considered degenerate by the mainstream. There were a lot of people who disagreed with this, but they were a minority, and you got things like the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy for the military and lots of companies that would not hire or openly advertise to gay people. You’d see occasional mentions of a gay person in media, but it was either fleeting and subtle or an ‘afterschool special’ type episode, and trans people were only suitable as the punchline for a joke. By the early 2000s, legalizing gay marriage was a hot topic, and shows like Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy were popular hits. In more and more social circles, being openly hostile to queer people would get you disapproved of. By the 2010s, gay marriage was legal throughout the US, and support for trans people is about where support for gay people was a decade earlier. This is a huge cultural change, things like gender neutral pronouns that were abstract queer theory that only a few weirdos talked about in 1990 now have widespread (nowhere near universal) acceptance.

5

My opinion is that changes have been slowing down. I think changes in style have been very slow since the early 1990s. Here are a few simple tests to show why I think this. Let’s say you look at some photos of group of young people. Let’s say they are from 1959, 1969, 1979, 1989, 1999, 2009, and 2019. Most of us would easily be able to identify which ones belong to 1959, 1969, 1979, and 1989. We might guess at 1999, but it would be harder. Trying to judge between 2009 and 2019 would likely be a coin flip. Same thing if we were to listen to an FM radio station from those years. Same thing for TV. The difference between The Brady Bunch and Friends is a lot more obvious than the difference between Friends and Modern Family.

6

Your first test is about clothing styles, which basically everyone agrees hasn’t changed that much, but also doesn’t say that much about culture. Broadcast radio is a dying, stagnant format of entertainment - and even then, I could probably tell you which year a radio station is from, because even though I don’t really follow popular music I would recognize a few specific songs as being later or earlier, and on a ‘classic rock’ station could tell by how high the newest songs go (guns n roses weren’t in classic rock rotation in the 90s, for example). I’m not that familiar with Friends or Modern Family, but compare Brooklyn 99 - you might see a broadcast TV sitcom where there’s a precinct run by a gay police captain in 2009, but not 1999 or earlier and certainly not with him happily married (though occasionally at odds with his husband) and with his situation being treated as simple fact instead of an absurd comedic element.

Let’s bring in a bit more culture. Instead of looking at a photo of people, take a quick look at their social media profiles and see if you can guess what year it is. In 1999 they wouldn’t have any, and even just the platform they use would be different in 2009 and 2019. Instead of just ‘listen to the radio’, take a road trip and listen to music in the car - in 1999 they’re likely to have a sheaf of CDs, by 2009 they’re likely to use an MP3 player or satellite radio, by 2019 they’re more likely on a streaming service like spotify. Try to compare a TV series like Game of Thrones or The Witcher to its equivalent in 2009 or 1999 - there’s not really much for comparison, “Xena - Warrior princess” isn’t going to stand up well to those.

7

I agree. Change since 1994 or so has been really slow, when it comes to fashion, slang and stuff. Technology is different, but I find it hard to imagine that information technology can improve that much. People aren’t going to be implanting into the Matrix anytime soon, regardless of what Ray Kurzweil says. I mean how much better can the Internet and phones really get?

8

I think cataclysmic disasters on a global scale, which are going to start increasing in about, oh whoops, now, are going to depress the kind of cultural change that is generally driven by young people with time on their hands. Instead we will start seeing the kind of changes that happen in truly frightening times, which we really have not had for quite some time in the US. Not since WWII really.

9

Searching on “how does technology change culture?” returns many examples. Yes, ever-faster tech development induces rapid-fire cultural twists quickly spreading globally. We won’t slow down. Watch those exponential curves.

10

All of this is, I feel, just people being too old to notice culture changing.

Concentrating on clothing or what TV shows are like is just indicative of not having one’s thumb on cultural change. Maybe clothing hasn’t changed much in 10-20 years (or maybe it has and you haven’t noticed, but let’s assume it hasn’t.) Why is that the important aspect of culture? Social liberalism has changed a LOT. Social media changes culture a lot, it’s not just a technological thing.

11

I agree that there has been some change, especially in the media used as you note the changes from CDs to MP3 players to streaming. But in the actual music not as much. In 1999 you may have had Mariah Carey, Britney Spears, or Backstreet Boys. In 2009 maybe Miley Cyrus, Katie Perry, or Taylor Swift. In 2019 there’s Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, and older but still working artists that were popular in 1999 like those I mentioned above.

As far as TV, I think we’re just now getting to the point where pop music was in the early 2000s. Yes, there is an obvious difference between Xena and Game of Thrones. But it’s not as big as the difference between Xena and something like Lost In Space or any other adventure or sci-fi series from the 60s or 70s.

12

I’m assuming the OP is on the young side. I’m 47. Let me give a chronicle of what a Friday might have been like in high school in 1990, to give some contrast.

Wake up when the alarm went off. Shower, shave, get dressed. Eat breakfast, maybe watch TV for a few minutes if I had time. Friends were scheduled to pick me up around 7:35 for ride to school. That meant that they might be there anywhere between 7:30 and 7:45 in practice. Get in car, listen to tape of NWA on 10 minute ride to school. Get to school, go to class. In free period or lunch, maybe read the newspaper. Chat with friends face to face. See what might be happening that night- rumors of parties, kegs, etc… Go back to class. Get out of school/athletics around 5-5:30. Dad picks me up on his way home. Chat with dad/listen to talk radio on 10 minute ride home.

Once at home, watch news/read newspaper to see what’s going on in the world. Call friends using land-line telephone and try to finalize plans if nothing had solidified during the school day. Come up with something- agree to pick up friends or be picked up. Take car/wait on friends. Go do whatever the plan was. A lot of the time, the plan falls apart, so you end up roaming around and/or hanging out with other teenagers at their house, or a handful of places where we could hang out without harassment. Be home by some time agreed-upon with parents. Go to bed.

This whole FOMO thing is kind of perplexing in that light; it was just part of the landscape back then- there wasn’t any real ability to adjust on the fly, because there wasn’t any way to communicate once you were no longer at home. So you tended to gather together, and then do stuff in groups, but a lot of the time, the being together WAS the event- hence the term “hanging out”. That’s also why being popular was more important- being popular meant that you had a wider social network and/or were more highly esteemed, so you actually heard a larger sample of the events that were going on, and had a better chance of doing fun/cool stuff than if you were a dork nobody talked to. It’s also why cars and drivers’ licenses were so important- you had to have them to do that initial gathering-up phase of socialization, or else you were stuck at home with your parents and siblings.

All that said, I think changes have slowed in some areas, and sped up dramatically in others, and the primary driver seems to be consumer technological change.

Pop culture seems to have stagnated somewhat, especially music. Back in my day(!) in the 1980s and 1990s, stuff from the 60s and early 70s was “oldies”. Now you may hear songs that are 10-15 years old on pop radio without any kind of “throwback Thursday” type stuff. You definitely did NOT get disco on pop radio when I was in high school, and it was only 10 years prior.

Culturally, things are wildly different, mostly due to a combination of smartphones and/or ubiquitous internet access. I mean, everyone’s got a phone on them that contains a tiny computer that’s more powerful than anything in the consumer world during the Cold War, and it’s all linked to the Internet 24/7. And it’s got location accuracy within about 30 feet, and a VERY high quality still and video camera. That’s game-changing. Just casual photography has changed recognizably since the Cold War. Not only do you not have to have a camera on you, you don’t have to deal with film, developing, printing, etc… And you can share them immediately- your family can see you at the Eiffel Tower RIGHT when you’re there. They don’t have to wait 2-3 weeks after you’re back for you to get your pictures developed and show the photo album or slide show. You can just send a selfie at that very second.

Same for traveling- getting lost/navigation isn’t nearly the issue that it used to be with GPS and Google Maps. Nor is finding places to eat, shop, etc… in places you’ve never been before. Or even in your own city for that matter.

Communication via text messages, emails and video chats like FaceTime, Zoom, etc… have changed how we interact in a lot of ways versus the Cold War era.

13

Again, culture is what we do, and technology is how we do it. Culture isn’t just 1st world clothes, pop music, and formulaic TV - it’s behavior. Cheap global travel spreads pandemics efficiently and online access actually allows billions to Shelter In Place, handling many tasks safely from refuge. Couldn’t do that a decade ago. Couldn’t relentlessly monitor our health before recent apps. Couldn’t remotely walk our dogs with aerial drones till lately. We get to act more and more variantly all the time!

MrsRico and I are in our early 70s. The world we were born into has transformed relentlessly and no, shows no propensity to slow the pace of change. Just wait till we have phone/data links implanted in our bodies. Zowie!

14

In 2000, how many people thought we’d have gay marriage, a black US president and legal pot? That psychedelics would be next? That the GOP would show its true colors* ? That there would be 57 genders?

That video stores would be dead because you could watch anything on your phone or stream it to your TV? That movies shown in movie theaters would often be dismissed as dumb while the higher quality stuff would be on TV? That gaming would be bigger than music and movies?

  • Orange and white.