Trends In Culture, 2013

Cafe Society
1

I was making a list of these myself, then I thought you people would be better at this than me. The thread How are the 2010s different from the 2000s? tells me other people are also interested in this.

So, the idea is to list down distinctive cultural things today, and in 10 years we’ll resurrect this and see if things have really changed. They can be from anything. Movies, fashion, photography, cuisine, website design.

Things I’ve noticed:
[ul]
[li]Rise of crowd-sourced, funded and other things. From creating content, like wiki, to voting, especially comments on many sites, likes on Facebook and especially Reddit. Increasing popularity of sites like Kickstarter, maybe even Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.[/li][li]Software companies are all pushing the cloud, such as Microsoft and Adobe.[/li][li]Continuous scrolling on websites like Facebook and Twitter. Instead of dividing into pages, once you reach the bottom, it loads more content.[/li][li]Use of JavaScript on websites for many functions, such as “pop-up windows” and drop down banner announcements. In particular, clicking on photos darkens the rest of the page and starts a “slideshow” (e.g. Facebook).[/li][li]Photography: intentionally making photos look old (unfortunately), faded, blurred. Using software as well as techniques such as expired film and pinhole cameras.[/li][li]Product photography: products are usually photographed against a flat or minimalistic background. Products are styled to look flawless, like they could be computer generated.[/li][li]There is also a trend towards simpler and simpler logos e.g. Starbucks and Pepsi.[/li][li]More and more movies are using orange and blue as dominant colours.[/li][/ul]

2

I see that the idea that 'technical changes in computers and applications are the same as “trends in culture” ’ is still alive… :wink:

Legalized Marijuana might actually catch on
Gay marriage
Obamacare is coming and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. Hopefully the majority of people get VERY USED TO the idea that it’s wrong to reject people from insurance rolls because of pre-existing conditions w/in a few years.

3

Rise of crowd-sourced, funded and other things. From creating content, like wiki, to voting, especially comments on many sites, likes on Facebook and especially Reddit. Increasing popularity of sites like Kickstarter, maybe even Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

I’ll give you Kickstarter, but Wikipedia and Facebook are old hat as far as Internet destinations go. Linking them to “2013” just makes you sound behind the times.

Software companies are all pushing the cloud, such as Microsoft and Adobe.

“The Cloud” is a meaningless turn of phrase that will shortly go the way of “Web 2.0,” mark my words.

Continuous scrolling on websites like Facebook and Twitter. Instead of dividing into pages, once you reach the bottom, it loads more content.

Not new. Both sites have been using continuous scrolling for years. I believe Twitter even launched with continuous scrolling back in 2006.

Use of JavaScript on websites for many functions, such as “pop-up windows” and drop down banner announcements. In particular, clicking on photos darkens the rest of the page and starts a “slideshow” (e.g. Facebook)

Javascript is a 2013 trend? For real? Javascript is such an ingrained part of the Internet, that I’m having trouble pointing to a time when pop-up windows and slideshows weren’t a big part of the browsing experience.

Photography: intentionally making photos look old (unfortunately), faded, blurred. Using software as well as techniques such as expired film and pinhole cameras.

I’ll allow it.

Product photography: products are usually photographed against a flat or minimalistic background. Products are styled to look flawless, like they could be computer generated.

I think I saw a news report on this once. It was on 20/20 and it was in the 80s.

There is also a trend towards simpler and simpler logos e.g. Starbucks and Pepsi.

The current Pepsi logo was introduced in 2008 and the current Starbucks logo is just a minor tweaking of the logo they’ve used since 1992.

More and more movies are using orange and blue as dominant colours.

Orange and Blue are opposite colors on the color wheel. They contrast well and make a movie scene “pop,” to use a director-y phrase. Nor is it a new trend:

http://www.gonemovies.com/www/XsFilms/SnelPlaatjes/ActDouglasSpartacus.jpg

4

As an old fart(59), something I have noticed that has changed over the past decade or so has been the acceptability of the unshaven look in business settings. My company is very loose regarding dress code, jeans and shorts are fine. But when I started here in 2000, I would never see a guy with two days growth on his face at work, and now it seems to be a common look.

5

Actually I was making a list of computer trends and decided to re-purpose it for this. But I tried to throw in some photography observations to make it less obvious.

Well most of the trends started a few years ago, but I’m quite sure FB didn’t do the photo slideshow thing from the start. When you clicked on a photo it took you to another page.

6

“Modernist cuisine”, “molecular gastronomy”, or whatever else they’re calling the contemporary chemistry-intensive approach to prestige cooking.

Soft-serve frozen yogurt is back, giving me 1980’s flashbacks.

A boom in young adult fantasy novels. They’ve always been around, but post-Potter the market seems to have heated up a lot.

Vampires. I am so sick and tired of vampires.

Mainstream (like, airport bookstore) mass-market erotica might be a coming (ha) trend, or it might just be a one-off (hee) with Fifty Shades of Gray.

7

Cupcakes as high cuisine, rather than birthday party snacks.

8

Bows and Arrows.

9

CGI has had a major impact on the kinds of movies that are made. They’ve made it possible to finally make great super-hero and fantasy movies. But I predict those two genres are reaching the saturation and backlash point and a new popular genre will emerge. My prediction is there’s going to be another wave of SF films. The new Disney Star Wars movies might be an anchor but I think once there are one or two big SF hits studios are going to realize there’s a huge untapped pool of SF literature than can be adapted into movies. I’m predicting a couple of dozen feature films based on classic SF stories by 2030.

10

Another prediction: entertainment distribution companies are committing suicide. I’m not talking about the individuals, groups, and companies that produce entertainment. I’m talking about the companies that sell entertainment made by others. Technology is eliminating the need for these middlemen. Rather than trying to figure out new ways to make themselves useful, they’re just trying to turn back the clock to a time when they had monopolies over distribution. There’s going to be a backlash against their attempts to force themselves in between the producers and customers.

11

The close cropped beard is definitely ‘on trend.’ Been building up for a few years.

I’ll add: the 2010s are when everyone, even late adapters switched from cell phone to smart phone.

And consequently: The anti-texting-while-driving decade.

12

You pretty much had to. I only use a cell phone when I’m traveling. My old cell phone broke last February so I had to buy a replacement. I shopped around at a number of stores and I couldn’t find any basic cell phones for sale. So I was forced to upgrade to a phone that had features I didn’t want and don’t plan on ever using.

13

I think ‘reality shows’ reflect and encourage a real trend towards self-centred, arrogant behaviour being made out as normal and appropriate [in my old fashioned view].

Tolerance of rudeness has increased. Back in my day … it would be incredibly rude to interrupt a face to face conversation to take a phone call, or be talking and expect to be served in a shop, but thats how it was in the late Palaeozoic.

Another technology-based one - its now possible for someone to completely lose most of the evidence they’ve chosen to keep of their existence at the press of a button. My friend lost a year’s worth of photos, no back up negs, no prints. Creepy.

14

Electronic music - Skrillex, Swedish House Mafia, deadmou5, etc.

I think it’s part of a growing cultural trend of prolonged adolescence. People aren’t having those transformations in college or their 20s anymore where they go from being selfish, entitled, self destructive a-holes into mature responsible adults. They just stay jerks forever now. I can’t stand when my wife puts on Bravo and all I hear are these 40-something women (or gay men) screaming at each other like bickering high school freshmen.

I think this need people have for keeping all this “evidence of their existence” is creepy.
Zombies. They’re in movies (World War Z, Warm Bodies. Zombieland), TV (The Walking Dead, “what if” shows on Discovery Channel), videogames (Left 4 Dead, Dead Island, WarZ, DayZ, even non-zombie games like SimCity or Call of Duty).

I feel like we are definitely in a dot.com 2.0. IOW, another cult of “Silicon Valley innovation” with questionable startups, “web incubators”, venture capitalists, “kickstarters” all trying to cash in on “social networking”, “big data”, “the cloud” or some other buzzword du jour.

John Carter was a bust. There’s the upcoming Ender’s Game film, but from the still shots I’ve seen it looks a bit “Starship Troopers Academy” to me. But there’s also an Avatar sequel coming plus a whole slew of sci-fi films like Oblivion, After Earth and Elysium.

Superhero films are still big - Iron Man 3, Man of Steel, Avengers 2

No link to Katness Everdeen, Hawkeye from The Avengers?

15

Well, let’s just compare today to 10 years ago.

Cities are now overrun by phone zombies. Who apparently are receiving urgent messages from their zombie planet that cause them to:

Get on elevators and forget to press their floor.
Get on elevators, press their floor and then not get off.
Go to a revolving door and stop.
Approach a security turnstile in an office building, wait for the doors to swing open, then stop.
Stop in the middle of a set of stairs.
Drift almost off the right side of the road.

I am waiting for some savvy smartphone maker to put a camera lens on the screen side of a phone, so you can put a little split screen image of yourself on there and look at yourself looking at your phone, so you’ll never feel alone, in case you haven’t received a text in the last 30 seconds.

16

For me, the big shift around 2013 in popular computer technology is to touch screens. I know they’ve been arounD awhile, but I really feel we’re at the major tipping point right now, where it’s now EXOECTED that a device (phone, tablet…) will have a touch screen.

(Yesterday, I was tired, and I unthinkingly tried to “touch” on my laptop screen. That’s when I knew this moment had come.)

Manifestations of this tipping point include:

  1. Windows 8 is the first version to assume the ubiquity of touch screens.
  2. Very young children – I’m talking one-year-olds – can suddenly surf the net and amuse themselves for hours in a way that, until recently, more often had to wait until they were four years old or so. There was a good New Yorker (or was it Atlantic Monthly?) article about this a couple months ago.

It’s interesting that the first time many of us encountered touch screens was with ATM machines, about ten years ago. For some folks (older ones, mostly), that’s still about the only place tgey use them.

17

I think the pop success of Fifty Shades of Grey among the soccer mom crowd is evidence that romance novels are evolving into erotic romances, empahsis on the erotic. Also that with readers able to buy ebooks online, the publishing industry won’t be able to control what people read in the future. Publishers that don’t pay strict attention to what readers want, instead of what publishers think they should want, will be put out business.

Also, BDSM is being mainstreamed, and a good thing too.

America is also headed for a class system, like old Britain, based on who has money and who does not. The one percent will cement their economic advantage by trying to build it into a permanent class advantage.

18

Not much of a challenge in predicting the pop culture trends that will occur this week. I explicitly said these were trends I was predicting between now and 2030.

19

As of 2013, the netbook is dead. Manufacturers are now pushing ultrabooks and tablets.

LEDs are slowly being adopted, mainly as lighting strips and down lights. We still don’t have high powered LEDs yet. The attempts at bulb replacements involve cramming as many LEDs as will fit in a bulb shape.

Coffee machines using pods are in vogue. Even coffee shops have their own brands. I think the real sign of this is empty pods being sold.

20

Last year at its peak, a lot of those old ladies checking out Fifty Shades from the library had no idea about the BDSM. They usually returned it in a huff and were sure to let the staff know it was “trash.”

However, those that like it seem to have moved on to the “Bared to You” series.