Mention the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, or 80’s and a very distinct style and patterns is conjured up.
The 50’s: Working father, Stay-at-Home Moms, poodle skirts, the beginnings of today’s rock-and-roll, outer-space type imaging, The Bomb, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe.
The 60’s: Flower power, the Kennedys, civil rights, Vietnam, bellbottoms, hippies, long hair.
The 70’s: Disco, Watergate, civil and women’s rights, women’s lib, the oil crisis, the sexual revolution, drugs.
The 80’s: Big hair, use of bold color, geometrical patterns, pop music, Madonna, AIDS, the Cold War.
From the 90’s to now, though, it seems like we’ve become so homogenized and bland that there’s none of those identifiers. Maybe I just can’t think of any right now.
30 years from now, what will the 90’s and the 2000’s be remember for?
So far, I’ve come up with the advent of the internet, the Clinton administration, terrorism and 9/11, maybe the Iraqi War.
There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of fashion… they say the low-slung pants/belly shirt fad is over yet I continue to see it every day. I’m so scared that it will never go away- it will be assimilated into permanence.
Hairstyles? 30 years from now will a picture of The Rachel or Ryan Seacrest’s do immediately conjure up ‘95-2005’?
Decades are not remembered for everything that actually happened, just for trends that got a lot of attention.
For the 90’s, grunge, heavy metal, spread of the internet and ridiculous dot coms
For the 2000’s it’s too early to tell. I do rather imagine that in 2050 people will view our anti-terrorism tactics much the same way that we view the idea of teaching kids to crawl under their desks in order to survive a nuclear attack.
Actually, plenty of women worked outside the home, in the 1950s. The lion’s share were black women and others of lower SES.
For this decade, perhaps the near total self-absorption–the “cocooning”–of America, despite war abroad and a host of pressing international issues. There seems to be no sense of common cause or of collective responsibility.
With the 00’s shaping up to be The Terrorism Decade, the 90’s will probably end up being seen in retrospect as The Last Safe Decade - the ten years between the end of the Cold War and the 9-11 attacks when we thought all the big problems were over.
The 90s seems to be a melting pot of the other decades. Like the fifties, it was a very prosperous time but there was a lot of social upheaval like there was in the sixties. Additionally, America seemed to become more urbanized like it did in the seventies and … uh, I’m sure it was like the eighties somehow.
I think Friends, Roseanne, grunge, hip hop, and alt-rock will be our pop culture trademarks.
Nope. As time passes, the shock and fear fades; we’re left with the direct effects and responses.
Since Y2K, around 5000 people have been killed in terrorist attacks. In the response to terrorism, around 15,000 more have been killed. We lose more than 20,000 wage-earners in America alone every year to influenza.
We’ll long remember the Civil War because 600,000 died in their prime in a nation of less than 40 million. We’ll never forget the Great War, where 15,000,000 died in four years. World War II will not fade any more than it has, because 50,000,000 died.
Where are the cities destroyed by terrorism, never to be rebuilt? Where are the mass graves?
I got it! I got it! I got it!
The decades when Hollywood producers ran out of Ideas (got lazy?) and started remaking old movies (and/or 67 sequels to last years big hit) in hopes of making $124.65 additional profit beating a really dead horse into the ground. (i.e., Jason vs. Freddy – Nightmare on Oak Street – Part 94)
“Just because everything’s different doesn’t mean anything’s changed.”
In other words, I agree completely. People have ideas about whole eras of time that don’t stand up to even the most trivial scrutiny. Yes, Virigina, there were large groups of nonconformists in the 1950s, and there was a huge majority of people in the 1960s who thought the radicals should sit down and shut up. Remember that the media never has and never will portray life as a whole accurately, because if people want that mirrors are much cheaper than movies. Combine that claptrap with the musty nostalgia common to dimestore historians and you get the absurd notion that decades can be used to divide up time.
In thirty years, everyone in political power will have been reduced to a set of clichés, with “Misunderestimate” meaning Bush II just like “I am not a crook” means Dick Nixon. The terrorism scares will be seen as parochial and generally laughable, like the Red Scares of the Depression and the Postwar Period. There won’t be very many albums from this era still being played, just like a whole buttload of the knockoffs from the early Rock’n’Roll-British Invasion age don’t get played these days.
As for names, I think the whole period from the advent of 24-hour television and cable TV to the proliferation of the Internet will be referred to as the Media Era: The era we turned on the TV, computers, and damned near everything else to the always-on global network.
The obesity epidemic (which i’m sure will be cured in the next 30 years or so), the information age, the internet, biotechnology, muslim fundamentalism, ghetto rap.