I’m stating the idea that the 20th Century began when Europe fell into WWI, the war that killed off most monarchies and set the stage for most of the other events of the Century, and ended when the Soviet Union fell and the main conflict of the world shifted from Superpower-vs-Superpower to Superpower-vs-Terrorists.
This works on a technological level as well: WWI saw the birth of the airplane and the submarine, two of the defining features of 20th Century warfare, and a bit later saw the birth of radio and television, the defining features of the Mass Media that dominated the 20th Century. In 1991, the Internet was officially opened to commercial use in America (prior to that it had been owned by government agencies, including ARPA and the National Science Foundation, and commercial use was strictly forbidden) giving rise to a Post-Mass Media world and the democratization of the very first many-to-many medium.
Culturally, who knows? In the UK, the Edwardian Period ended with WWI and the Modernist period began after it (Dada, Bauhaus, Futurism) but I don’t know enough about the cultural shifts of the 1990s to comment.
Ok. This is what I am wondering. How is it that teenagers who don’t watch the news (politics), are beyond drama (psychology and sociology) - who learn philosophy either in class or outside of class, or maybe it’s innate… alright then, how is it that those teens playing video games and watching sci-fi, how is it that they come to arguably a better understanding of the world than others?
Look at what happened in The Night of the Comet when Regina, an `80s girl I absolutely love :o who plays Tempest suddenly finds that it’s the end of the world. Or watch how Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy in WarGames have fun with a little game of global thermonuclear war.
That was the 80s. Ironically, philosophically stable.
I’m not sure I understand your first paragraph at all. But in your second paragraph, you seem to be implying that the teenaged characters in the movies are better-adjusted than the adults around them, which argues in favor of your thesis?
These teenaged characters - these fictional people, whose lines were probably written by real people who came of age in the 70’s? Are these the folks on whom you’re hanging your observation?
Pretty much the same point that Woodstockbirdybird said…you know, about reality. It may have been a real delorean, but Michael J. Fox didn’t actually go back in time.
I don’t understand philosophical stability. I agree that years ending in 0 don’t mean anything. (The '60s began in 1963 and ended in 1974, for instance) but that won’t stop me. I don’t see how the '80s are more stable in any way than the '50s.
Instead of Atari the '50s had TV, but TV was mostly used to enhance stability, with an emphasis on brave men doing brave jobs, good cowboys, and whitebread family units. Satellites affected very little of life until the '60s, and the space age began with the V2 anyway. The threat of nuclear war kept everyone quiet, plus we had an old, moderate, president for most of it.
There were maybe fewer sf novels in the '50s, but a lot more stories in a lot more magazines. The “radical” sf was mostly fairly tame satires of things like advertising - though Kornbluth was a bit stronger. The '50s were far more stable in every way.
The Korean War was in the beginning of the decade - which really didn’t start until Ike took over.
The Civil Rights movement was very low key. Sure there was Brown v Board of Education, and Little Rock, but not nearly as disruptive as the early '60s.
The nuclear threat actually contributed to stability, since family and stability were used to counter the possibility we’d get blown up at any time. (I spent some time in school under desks.) Most of the fear was funneled into giant monster movies and after the war sf.
I was going to mention McCarthyism. That was a last gasp of the '40s Hiss-Chambers case. It was bad in the beginning, but that threat to stability got quashed, and McCarthy drank himself to death.
I lived through both decades, and the '50s were far quieter.
You have yet to demonstrate that they did come to a “better understanding of the world than others”.
Oh, and looking just at the summary of the book you linked, it doesn’t seem confined to the 80s. It just explains that pop culture somehow makes us smarter. Again, what has that to do with the 80s, and why not the 70s, or the 90s?
Ironically, philosophically stable.
