8 ms·

Decades

106 points by nikbackm 9y ago

coding123 9y ago
I have a feeling it will come back with the 20's, which will piss off centenarians. And everyone is going to use the term super early, like I wonder what the 20's are going to be like. We're going to have self driving cars in the 20s. They're going to overuse the term, you'll see.
sr2 9y ago
I still see the term 'millennial fashion' and 'the noughties' been thrown around, but these are meaningless terms. Here's an interesting talk by Adam Conover debunking the term millennial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  doesn't 'the noughties' just mean 2000-2009 (plus or minus one on either end)?
  - sr2 9y ago
    Yeah it does, but it's a corruption of the previous attempts at labeling decades and doesn't really solve the problem of labeling decades. A decade is actually meaningless in terms of what it represents culturally, and since the explosion of The Internet, culture is now smeared and has no basis in a decade anymore. We've reached a post-post-post-post modern era. Rushkoff goes into this more in his 'present shock' theory https://www.theverge.com/2013/3/21/4131130/obsessed-with-now-douglas-rushkoff-and-the-threat-of-present-shock https://www.theverge.com/2013/3/21/4131130/obsessed-with-now...
    - jamesrcole 9y ago
      Sometimes you just want to refer to a granular period of time -- e.g. "I was living in Alaska in the noughties" or "It wasn't until the noughties that I decided what I really wanted to do in my career" -- and as far as that goes such a term can be useful.
      - sr2 9y ago
        Fair point. I get funny looks when I say something like this though: "I was living in Alaska in the holocene era". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar
- chadgeidel 9y ago
  You may be interested in Adam's follow up with Jean Twenge on the "Adam Ruins Everything podcast" http://www.maximumfun.org/adam-ruins-everything/adam-ruins-everything-episode-28-jean-twenge-and-adam-discuss-their-difference http://www.maximumfun.org/adam-ruins-everything/adam-ruins-e...
arkaic 9y ago
I think this coincides with the rise of the Internet. With information, discussions, and media of the past 20 years being instantly accessible, the disconnect from looking at the past is really tenuous or it doesn't exist anymore, and everything just sort of melds together.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
Were cultural memes grouped by decade before radio? Seems like these standard groupings were a product of a broadcast media that doesn't exist to normalise patterns anymore.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Were cultural memes grouped by decade before radio? The earliest popular decade association I am aware of is the "gay 90s" image of the 1890s, which apparently was popularized in print media in the 1920s, roughly concurrent with (but independent of) the emergence of commercial radio. So, perhaps not before radio, but also not originally driven by radio, either.
wizzzzzy 9y ago
Isn't this also partly due to the post modern nature of fashion and culture over the last 15 years. Everything seems to be a reference in some form or another to the preceding 4 decades.
andrenotgiant 9y ago
During the 90s, did people refer to present day trends as "[90s ___]"? People have started using "2000s" to describe the 2000-2010 decade. For example: "music of the 2000s" https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=music%20of%20the%202000s,music%20of%20the%2090s https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=music%20... But that only became necessary in the past few years, before that you could just call it "pop music" I think decades blur together enough that it takes a few years before people are comfortable generalizing them into a single term.
- baldfat 9y ago
  Absolutely and they were defined super quick. It meant plaid shirts and grunge pretty quickly. I think the 90s were easy since the 70s and 80s were so quirky. We haven't changed a lot in the past 27 years as much as 1977 to 1994. I blame it on the Internet and global shared experiences in media. Even the accents have died. Now I'm not complaining them Boston Accents were horrible!!!
- jerf 9y ago
  'During the 90s, did people refer to present day trends as "[90s ___]"?' Yes, although X-TREME!!! would have been considered an acceptable synonym, appropriately inflected.
- deelowe 9y ago
  yep. "The 90s" was used extensively during the period to refer to all sorts of things. We knew what 90s fashion was as it was occurring (hammer pants, fanny packs, extensive use of teal, hypercolor, etc...)
- dwringer 9y ago
  I think the problem stems also in part from that while the 1900's and 1910's may have been called the 'oughts and 19-tens or 19-teens, those terms aren't extremely common today and "twenty-teens" also sounds strange. "twenty-tens" sounds to me a little bit like you're referring to the year 2010 in plural since the year is in recent memory. I will be very much surprised if "20's" does not come to refer to the 2020's; even more so if "30's" doesn't make it.
noonespecial 9y ago
My little daughter watches MacGuyver, Hannah Montana, the A Team and Jessie all back to back without a second thought. She loves The Beatles and LFO. The internet smeared culture all over the surface of life like wet paint. The "generation gap" is dead and buried.
- TelmoMenezes 9y ago
  I highly recommend William Gibson's "Blue Ant" trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History) if you're into this sort of topic.
  - ConceptJunkie 9y ago
    I really enjoyed "Pattern Recognition" and was unaware there were sequels. This is good news.
- nothis 9y ago
  Interesting point but I'll hijack it to point out there's a 2016 McGuyver TV series and a 2010 A-Team movie.
  - smhenderson 9y ago
    I wondered about that too. A few years ago I mentioned how much my son loved the Beatles song "Hello, Hello" as proof of how well that music aged. He was like, yeah, it's in that Target commercial. Made me rethink things a bit. That said I guess it's in the commercial because it aged so well. But I do agree that the internet has effectively quite reduced, if not eliminated, the "generation gap" my parents and my peers grew up with in the 60's to the 80's...
- chasing 9y ago
  Yeah, I think people don't realize that the extreme variation in culture over the decades of the 20th century was due, in part, to the fact that older media simply wasn't available. Think of the 70s. Want to watch a TV show from the 60s? You're SOL. Maybe you can find records from bands of that era, but want to see fashion trends from a decade earlier? What do you do? Dig up old magazines in the library? Want to watch an old movie? Better hope it turns up on TV or as a rerelease in theaters. Culture really did exist in this relatively narrow window of just a few years. That's completely gone, now, and I just don't think we're going to see these dramatic decade-tagged cultural shifts any more.
sputknick 9y ago
Is it just me getting old, or has fashion not changed much since 2000? I was watching Road Trip the other day and thought "these clothes are basically what kids wear today". Watching a movie from 1980 in 2000, the clothes would have looked foreign. This may not sound like a Hacker News topic, but does this signal some type of cultural equilibrium? Could it be that in a connected world there's less reason to stand out in your dress?
- mortenjorck 9y ago
  It's not just you getting old: http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-201201 http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-2...
  - irrational 9y ago
    "Look through a current fashion or architecture magazine or listen to 10 random new pop songs; if you didn’t already know they were all things from the 2010s, I guarantee you couldn’t tell me with certainty they weren’t from the 2000s or 1990s or 1980s or even earlier." The other day I was in the car with my 17 year old and a song came on the radio from the late 90s and she thought it was a new song. I didn't laugh because I've noticed the sameness to pop music myself and if I hadn't lived through it I probably couldn't tell either.
    - ashark 9y ago
      We seem to have stabilized at "electronic (=cheap to make) hip-hop influenced auto-tune pop" as the basic standard for top-40s music. [EDIT] I gather someone may have thought I was taking a swipe at electronic music? I wasn't, but its enduring appeal for the commercial side of the industry is probably related to costs.
      - dpark 9y ago
        In what way is electronic music meaningfully cheaper to make? You still need to book a studio unless you're going pure instrumental, and that's where the cost is. I guess you get to cut out a dependency on studio musicians, but I don't think studio musicians actually get paid that much.
mortenjorck 9y ago
Munroe's linguistic hypothesis is interesting and may prove valid, but I think what we're seeing is likely due to deeper cultural shifts. William Gibson's circa-2010 observation that "the present is really of no width whatever" hints at a more atomized popular concept of time and the dissolution of the concept of the regular, periodic structure of decades in the 20th century. I wouldn't be surprised if by the mid-2020s we've more or less abandoned the concept of decades in favor of an ad-hoc system of domain-based periods loosely defined within cultural groups - I'd say to some degree, we're doing that already.
- ConceptJunkie 9y ago
  I think you're right as well. A lot of the distinctiveness of sounds in popular music were driven by improvements in technology in the 60s through the 80s or 90s, but that's no longer the case. The same can be said about movies up to the last several years. With the exception of (the scourge of) Autotune, has any technology really changed how music sounds since the tidal wave of digital sampling in the early to mid 80s? Similarly, the massive advances in computer graphics have radically altered movie making in the 80s through 2010 or so, but those advances are becoming much less noticeable from year to year.
a_humean 9y ago
I think its actually a more substantial shift. With media being so accessible it almost feels that the generational cultural gap is blurring and narrowing. I have access within moments the entire popular culture catalog of music, films, and TV shows going back decades. There seems to be a great convergence and preservation of culture. I'm as likely to listen to 60s & 70s David Bowie as I am to listen to the new Arcade Fire album coming out later this year. The past two decades almost seem to blur into each other culturally. People basically dress exactly as they did 20 years ago as far as I can tell. Maybe that's because these two decades and the coming decade are my prime years and so I lack perceptive as a late 20 something who is still neither quite young nor yet middle aged.
- ashark 9y ago
  Something lost on second-half-of-millenial-generation and up will be just how inaccessible media was, even well into the 90s. Movies took years to be released on video. What you could buy was mostly whatever the local stores chose to stock. You'd probably not even know about all kinds of media because it never showed up anywhere you could see it, unless you read lots of industry/medium specific magazines or something. Music? Hope your record/CD store has it or will order it. TV show? Didn't record it when it aired? Gone. You can watch TV Guide and try to catch a rerun. In a few years maybe it'll be one of a handful of episodes released on VHS (full seasons? LOL no, or incredibly expensive in the unlikely event that they are released). Want to see some family photos from someone across the country? Call them, oh they're out, leave a message on their answering machine that you'd like them to go get prints made and mail them to you. You may see them in a month. You'll have no idea what you're getting until they show up, unless you've seen them in person before. And shortly before that, it was even worse. Home releases of movies? Haha, what's that? Maybe a super-expensive 16mm print will be available at some point for home projectors. A short while ago mass media was far more ephemeral and inaccessible than it is now. Before that it didn't really exist, outside print. Want to hear music? Know anyone who can play it? No? You're out of luck. Better learn an instrument. Film? What's that? Maybe you can catch a stage show at the local harvest festival. Maybe your kids will stage something in the living room. That'd be nice. We're not that far removed from those times. This has been a huge shift in people's relations to one another (to paraphrase Vonnegut, people's small artistic talents used to be very valuable to their friends, family, and community, but they're now in competition with the best in the world, rendering any expression of those talents low-value and eccentric) and to media itself. We've gained a lot, but more than a little's been lost. Sometimes it feels like we're drowning in media, and I'm not sure the trade-off of being able to watch Hogan's Heroes or whatever at a moment's notice rather than waiting for a rerun is entirely worth centering our lives on screens and speakers so completely.
SpeakMouthWords 9y ago
The bottom line says "and and"
roguecoder 9y ago
I wonder what impact Boomers have on this too. Last year the Boomers finally lost their status as the biggest generation, so I would expect to see the importance of the 60's, 70's and 80's begin to decline. At the same time, we see nostalgia for the 90's starting: Bill Nye, Full House, Surge...
falsedan 9y ago
Where's the joke. Give me my funnies, internet laughman
- falsedan 9y ago
  I am doing much out loud, but no laughing? What kind of a comic is this?!
sethrin 9y ago
I don't know about the teens, but the first decade of this century definitely needs to be the 'naughties'.
tudorizer 9y ago
I wonder if in the 1900s they had the same issues...
- leg100 9y ago
  I think they did. We talk of the 20's, 30s, right up to 90s, but not of the decades 1900-1909 and 1910-19. Having said that, up til around then, times were grouped by the reigning monarch, at least in Britain: Georgian, Victorian, then Edwardian to cover 1901-WWI.
  - ashark 9y ago
    "Turn of the century" isn't only used for 1900-1909, but is sometimes used in that rôle.
irrational 9y ago
I can remember during the later half of the 90s people started asking how we would refer to the first two decades of the new millennium since we were so used to talking about the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Here we are 20+ years later and there still isn't an answer! The people 2097 are going to be writing articles about how much we suck for not figuring this out for them ;-)
- archie_peach 9y ago
  I always thought it was the Noughties and the Teenies?
  - irrational 9y ago
    I've never heard of those terms, but I like Noughties. "Do you remember getting naughty in the Noughties?"
TomSawyer 9y ago
Maybe artificially grouping trends by an arbitrary ten year period is what's weird?
ljf 9y ago
I hate it, but I have fallen into calling the 2000-2009 the 'noughtys' - which I first heard on a radio show in 1999 and thought sounded stupid, but soon stuck for me. As for the teens... well we are still in them, so yes they are just 'music, art, etc.' in the same way that I don't say: "So I was talking _English_ to a friend today..."
a_c 9y ago
what if there isn't a well known term to describe this period? For instance, I have never heard of "noughties" https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/107437/there-are-70s-80s-and-90s-how-do-you-describe-the-years-from-2000-00s https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/107437/there-are-70s...
BjoernKW 9y ago
I think there's a larger cultural phenomenon at play here. Perhaps it's just me or or maybe my generation (those born in the late 70s) has a somewhat unique perspective on this but I think there were 3 pivotal developments around the end of the 80s / the beginning of the 90s: - the fall of the Iron Curtain - the advent of the World Wide Web and widespread use of personal computers and the internet - globalisation becoming a considerable and perceptible factor in everyday life (mainly due to developments #1 and #2) These developments to some extent caused cultural perceptions and distinctions - both spatial and temporal - to blur. In my personal perception the 80s are still just 10 years ago.
- dpark 9y ago
  > In my personal perception the 80s are still just 10 years ago I think it's got less to do with any world events and more to do with the fact that you reached adulthood around then. The mid-80s were about 10 years before you graduated. The 90s started 10 years before I graduated, so that's my "10 years ago" point. Meanwhile the people born right after I graduated are about to reach adulthood, which feels like an impossible reality.
- cholantesh 9y ago
  > In my personal perception the 80s are still just 10 years ago. I have experienced this for the 90s, when I grew up. It truly is freaky to have that brief realisation that T2 is over 25 years old.
wmichelin 9y ago
Go watch any music video from 2000 to 2005, there definitely is a style of the time, that is distinguishable from the style of today.
- douche 9y ago
  Back in that twilight era when there were music videos for most hit songs, and MTV was actually still showing them. People are going to be amazed at what a big deal TRL and Carson Daly were. Some of those videos from that era were really elaborate, almost short films. Now we seem to have largely gone back to a more 80s-style, where the bands just perform.
strin 9y ago
My theory is based on the Internet. First, people are now exposed to vastly more information that in 80s or 90s. This forges the diversity in taste and segregation of pop culture. Second, trends come and go at faster cycle than before. If something on Youtube goes viral, this could be in pop culture for weeks and then vanished in the shadow of another fad.
hysan 9y ago
Perhaps this is the result of increased computing power, search engine use, and the internet in the 2000s. Since computers can now let you automatically organize, tag, and find any kind of music you want, there's less need to manually break down music into larger categories for organization. Combine this with YouTube and social media dictating what's popular or has gone viral, and you end up with a generation of consumers that sees movies, fashion, movies, and culture more as a constantly moving trend than something that stays static for a long period of time.
jarjoura 9y ago
It's pretty amazing, I can watch a movie from 1997 and feel transformed to a different time. Also people went into rooms to use phones attached to the wall, and computers took up entire desks. Though funny enough, I think fashion from then is coming back in style. It was very clearly the last year before everyone got all caught up in 60s revival fashion with Austin Powers. I don't get that same feeling if I look at movies and photos from 2007. Everything looks the same as today.
squozzer 9y ago
I think in ye olden days there was a deliberate attempt by someone -- the shadowy world of cultural illuminati, maybe - to segment by decade, even though I never remember any directives saying, "It's now 1980 -- please burn all of your stuff that dates from 1979 or earlier."
andruby 9y ago
Here on Belgian radio, we call the music from 2000-2010 the "Nillies". As in "Back to the 90s & Nillies" [0]. As for 2010-2020, I'm sure we'll just call them the Dixies in a few years. [0] http://www.the90s.be/ http://www.the90s.be/

106 points by nikbackm 9y ago

I have a feeling it will come back with the 20's, which will piss off centenarians. And everyone is going to use the term super early, like I wonder what the 20's are going to be like. We're going to have self driving cars in the 20s. They're going to overuse the term, you'll see.

sr2 9y ago

I still see the term 'millennial fashion' and 'the noughties' been thrown around, but these are meaningless terms. Here's an interesting talk by Adam Conover debunking the term millennial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ

jamesrcole 9y ago
doesn't 'the noughties' just mean 2000-2009 (plus or minus one on either end)?
- sr2 9y ago
  Yeah it does, but it's a corruption of the previous attempts at labeling decades and doesn't really solve the problem of labeling decades. A decade is actually meaningless in terms of what it represents culturally, and since the explosion of The Internet, culture is now smeared and has no basis in a decade anymore. We've reached a post-post-post-post modern era. Rushkoff goes into this more in his 'present shock' theory https://www.theverge.com/2013/3/21/4131130/obsessed-with-now-douglas-rushkoff-and-the-threat-of-present-shock https://www.theverge.com/2013/3/21/4131130/obsessed-with-now...
  - jamesrcole 9y ago
    Sometimes you just want to refer to a granular period of time -- e.g. "I was living in Alaska in the noughties" or "It wasn't until the noughties that I decided what I really wanted to do in my career" -- and as far as that goes such a term can be useful.
    - sr2 9y ago
      Fair point. I get funny looks when I say something like this though: "I was living in Alaska in the holocene era". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar
chadgeidel 9y ago
You may be interested in Adam's follow up with Jean Twenge on the "Adam Ruins Everything podcast" http://www.maximumfun.org/adam-ruins-everything/adam-ruins-everything-episode-28-jean-twenge-and-adam-discuss-their-difference http://www.maximumfun.org/adam-ruins-everything/adam-ruins-e...

arkaic 9y ago

I think this coincides with the rise of the Internet. With information, discussions, and media of the past 20 years being instantly accessible, the disconnect from looking at the past is really tenuous or it doesn't exist anymore, and everything just sort of melds together.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

Were cultural memes grouped by decade before radio? Seems like these standard groupings were a product of a broadcast media that doesn't exist to normalise patterns anymore.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> Were cultural memes grouped by decade before radio? The earliest popular decade association I am aware of is the "gay 90s" image of the 1890s, which apparently was popularized in print media in the 1920s, roughly concurrent with (but independent of) the emergence of commercial radio. So, perhaps not before radio, but also not originally driven by radio, either.

wizzzzzy 9y ago

Isn't this also partly due to the post modern nature of fashion and culture over the last 15 years. Everything seems to be a reference in some form or another to the preceding 4 decades.

andrenotgiant 9y ago

During the 90s, did people refer to present day trends as "[90s ___]"? People have started using "2000s" to describe the 2000-2010 decade. For example: "music of the 2000s" https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=music%20of%20the%202000s,music%20of%20the%2090s https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=music%20... But that only became necessary in the past few years, before that you could just call it "pop music" I think decades blur together enough that it takes a few years before people are comfortable generalizing them into a single term.

baldfat 9y ago
Absolutely and they were defined super quick. It meant plaid shirts and grunge pretty quickly. I think the 90s were easy since the 70s and 80s were so quirky. We haven't changed a lot in the past 27 years as much as 1977 to 1994. I blame it on the Internet and global shared experiences in media. Even the accents have died. Now I'm not complaining them Boston Accents were horrible!!!
jerf 9y ago
'During the 90s, did people refer to present day trends as "[90s ___]"?' Yes, although X-TREME!!! would have been considered an acceptable synonym, appropriately inflected.
deelowe 9y ago
yep. "The 90s" was used extensively during the period to refer to all sorts of things. We knew what 90s fashion was as it was occurring (hammer pants, fanny packs, extensive use of teal, hypercolor, etc...)
dwringer 9y ago
I think the problem stems also in part from that while the 1900's and 1910's may have been called the 'oughts and 19-tens or 19-teens, those terms aren't extremely common today and "twenty-teens" also sounds strange. "twenty-tens" sounds to me a little bit like you're referring to the year 2010 in plural since the year is in recent memory. I will be very much surprised if "20's" does not come to refer to the 2020's; even more so if "30's" doesn't make it.

noonespecial 9y ago

My little daughter watches MacGuyver, Hannah Montana, the A Team and Jessie all back to back without a second thought. She loves The Beatles and LFO. The internet smeared culture all over the surface of life like wet paint. The "generation gap" is dead and buried.

TelmoMenezes 9y ago
I highly recommend William Gibson's "Blue Ant" trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History) if you're into this sort of topic.
- ConceptJunkie 9y ago
  I really enjoyed "Pattern Recognition" and was unaware there were sequels. This is good news.
nothis 9y ago
Interesting point but I'll hijack it to point out there's a 2016 McGuyver TV series and a 2010 A-Team movie.
- smhenderson 9y ago
  I wondered about that too. A few years ago I mentioned how much my son loved the Beatles song "Hello, Hello" as proof of how well that music aged. He was like, yeah, it's in that Target commercial. Made me rethink things a bit. That said I guess it's in the commercial because it aged so well. But I do agree that the internet has effectively quite reduced, if not eliminated, the "generation gap" my parents and my peers grew up with in the 60's to the 80's...
chasing 9y ago
Yeah, I think people don't realize that the extreme variation in culture over the decades of the 20th century was due, in part, to the fact that older media simply wasn't available. Think of the 70s. Want to watch a TV show from the 60s? You're SOL. Maybe you can find records from bands of that era, but want to see fashion trends from a decade earlier? What do you do? Dig up old magazines in the library? Want to watch an old movie? Better hope it turns up on TV or as a rerelease in theaters. Culture really did exist in this relatively narrow window of just a few years. That's completely gone, now, and I just don't think we're going to see these dramatic decade-tagged cultural shifts any more.

sputknick 9y ago

Is it just me getting old, or has fashion not changed much since 2000? I was watching Road Trip the other day and thought "these clothes are basically what kids wear today". Watching a movie from 1980 in 2000, the clothes would have looked foreign. This may not sound like a Hacker News topic, but does this signal some type of cultural equilibrium? Could it be that in a connected world there's less reason to stand out in your dress?

mortenjorck 9y ago
It's not just you getting old: http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-201201 http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-2...
- irrational 9y ago
  "Look through a current fashion or architecture magazine or listen to 10 random new pop songs; if you didn’t already know they were all things from the 2010s, I guarantee you couldn’t tell me with certainty they weren’t from the 2000s or 1990s or 1980s or even earlier." The other day I was in the car with my 17 year old and a song came on the radio from the late 90s and she thought it was a new song. I didn't laugh because I've noticed the sameness to pop music myself and if I hadn't lived through it I probably couldn't tell either.
  - ashark 9y ago
    We seem to have stabilized at "electronic (=cheap to make) hip-hop influenced auto-tune pop" as the basic standard for top-40s music. [EDIT] I gather someone may have thought I was taking a swipe at electronic music? I wasn't, but its enduring appeal for the commercial side of the industry is probably related to costs.
    - dpark 9y ago
      In what way is electronic music meaningfully cheaper to make? You still need to book a studio unless you're going pure instrumental, and that's where the cost is. I guess you get to cut out a dependency on studio musicians, but I don't think studio musicians actually get paid that much.

mortenjorck 9y ago

Munroe's linguistic hypothesis is interesting and may prove valid, but I think what we're seeing is likely due to deeper cultural shifts. William Gibson's circa-2010 observation that "the present is really of no width whatever" hints at a more atomized popular concept of time and the dissolution of the concept of the regular, periodic structure of decades in the 20th century. I wouldn't be surprised if by the mid-2020s we've more or less abandoned the concept of decades in favor of an ad-hoc system of domain-based periods loosely defined within cultural groups - I'd say to some degree, we're doing that already.

ConceptJunkie 9y ago
I think you're right as well. A lot of the distinctiveness of sounds in popular music were driven by improvements in technology in the 60s through the 80s or 90s, but that's no longer the case. The same can be said about movies up to the last several years. With the exception of (the scourge of) Autotune, has any technology really changed how music sounds since the tidal wave of digital sampling in the early to mid 80s? Similarly, the massive advances in computer graphics have radically altered movie making in the 80s through 2010 or so, but those advances are becoming much less noticeable from year to year.

a_humean 9y ago

I think its actually a more substantial shift. With media being so accessible it almost feels that the generational cultural gap is blurring and narrowing. I have access within moments the entire popular culture catalog of music, films, and TV shows going back decades. There seems to be a great convergence and preservation of culture. I'm as likely to listen to 60s & 70s David Bowie as I am to listen to the new Arcade Fire album coming out later this year. The past two decades almost seem to blur into each other culturally. People basically dress exactly as they did 20 years ago as far as I can tell. Maybe that's because these two decades and the coming decade are my prime years and so I lack perceptive as a late 20 something who is still neither quite young nor yet middle aged.

ashark 9y ago
Something lost on second-half-of-millenial-generation and up will be just how inaccessible media was, even well into the 90s. Movies took years to be released on video. What you could buy was mostly whatever the local stores chose to stock. You'd probably not even know about all kinds of media because it never showed up anywhere you could see it, unless you read lots of industry/medium specific magazines or something. Music? Hope your record/CD store has it or will order it. TV show? Didn't record it when it aired? Gone. You can watch TV Guide and try to catch a rerun. In a few years maybe it'll be one of a handful of episodes released on VHS (full seasons? LOL no, or incredibly expensive in the unlikely event that they are released). Want to see some family photos from someone across the country? Call them, oh they're out, leave a message on their answering machine that you'd like them to go get prints made and mail them to you. You may see them in a month. You'll have no idea what you're getting until they show up, unless you've seen them in person before. And shortly before that, it was even worse. Home releases of movies? Haha, what's that? Maybe a super-expensive 16mm print will be available at some point for home projectors. A short while ago mass media was far more ephemeral and inaccessible than it is now. Before that it didn't really exist, outside print. Want to hear music? Know anyone who can play it? No? You're out of luck. Better learn an instrument. Film? What's that? Maybe you can catch a stage show at the local harvest festival. Maybe your kids will stage something in the living room. That'd be nice. We're not that far removed from those times. This has been a huge shift in people's relations to one another (to paraphrase Vonnegut, people's small artistic talents used to be very valuable to their friends, family, and community, but they're now in competition with the best in the world, rendering any expression of those talents low-value and eccentric) and to media itself. We've gained a lot, but more than a little's been lost. Sometimes it feels like we're drowning in media, and I'm not sure the trade-off of being able to watch Hogan's Heroes or whatever at a moment's notice rather than waiting for a rerun is entirely worth centering our lives on screens and speakers so completely.

SpeakMouthWords 9y ago

The bottom line says "and and"

roguecoder 9y ago

I wonder what impact Boomers have on this too. Last year the Boomers finally lost their status as the biggest generation, so I would expect to see the importance of the 60's, 70's and 80's begin to decline. At the same time, we see nostalgia for the 90's starting: Bill Nye, Full House, Surge...

falsedan 9y ago

Where's the joke. Give me my funnies, internet laughman

falsedan 9y ago
I am doing much out loud, but no laughing? What kind of a comic is this?!

sethrin 9y ago

I don't know about the teens, but the first decade of this century definitely needs to be the 'naughties'.

tudorizer 9y ago

I wonder if in the 1900s they had the same issues...

leg100 9y ago
I think they did. We talk of the 20's, 30s, right up to 90s, but not of the decades 1900-1909 and 1910-19. Having said that, up til around then, times were grouped by the reigning monarch, at least in Britain: Georgian, Victorian, then Edwardian to cover 1901-WWI.
- ashark 9y ago
  "Turn of the century" isn't only used for 1900-1909, but is sometimes used in that rôle.

irrational 9y ago

I can remember during the later half of the 90s people started asking how we would refer to the first two decades of the new millennium since we were so used to talking about the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Here we are 20+ years later and there still isn't an answer! The people 2097 are going to be writing articles about how much we suck for not figuring this out for them ;-)

archie_peach 9y ago
I always thought it was the Noughties and the Teenies?
- irrational 9y ago
  I've never heard of those terms, but I like Noughties. "Do you remember getting naughty in the Noughties?"

TomSawyer 9y ago

Maybe artificially grouping trends by an arbitrary ten year period is what's weird?

ljf 9y ago

I hate it, but I have fallen into calling the 2000-2009 the 'noughtys' - which I first heard on a radio show in 1999 and thought sounded stupid, but soon stuck for me. As for the teens... well we are still in them, so yes they are just 'music, art, etc.' in the same way that I don't say: "So I was talking _English_ to a friend today..."

a_c 9y ago

what if there isn't a well known term to describe this period? For instance, I have never heard of "noughties" https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/107437/there-are-70s-80s-and-90s-how-do-you-describe-the-years-from-2000-00s https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/107437/there-are-70s...

BjoernKW 9y ago

I think there's a larger cultural phenomenon at play here. Perhaps it's just me or or maybe my generation (those born in the late 70s) has a somewhat unique perspective on this but I think there were 3 pivotal developments around the end of the 80s / the beginning of the 90s: - the fall of the Iron Curtain - the advent of the World Wide Web and widespread use of personal computers and the internet - globalisation becoming a considerable and perceptible factor in everyday life (mainly due to developments #1 and #2) These developments to some extent caused cultural perceptions and distinctions - both spatial and temporal - to blur. In my personal perception the 80s are still just 10 years ago.

dpark 9y ago
> In my personal perception the 80s are still just 10 years ago I think it's got less to do with any world events and more to do with the fact that you reached adulthood around then. The mid-80s were about 10 years before you graduated. The 90s started 10 years before I graduated, so that's my "10 years ago" point. Meanwhile the people born right after I graduated are about to reach adulthood, which feels like an impossible reality.
cholantesh 9y ago
> In my personal perception the 80s are still just 10 years ago. I have experienced this for the 90s, when I grew up. It truly is freaky to have that brief realisation that T2 is over 25 years old.

wmichelin 9y ago

Go watch any music video from 2000 to 2005, there definitely is a style of the time, that is distinguishable from the style of today.

douche 9y ago
Back in that twilight era when there were music videos for most hit songs, and MTV was actually still showing them. People are going to be amazed at what a big deal TRL and Carson Daly were. Some of those videos from that era were really elaborate, almost short films. Now we seem to have largely gone back to a more 80s-style, where the bands just perform.

strin 9y ago

My theory is based on the Internet. First, people are now exposed to vastly more information that in 80s or 90s. This forges the diversity in taste and segregation of pop culture. Second, trends come and go at faster cycle than before. If something on Youtube goes viral, this could be in pop culture for weeks and then vanished in the shadow of another fad.

hysan 9y ago

Perhaps this is the result of increased computing power, search engine use, and the internet in the 2000s. Since computers can now let you automatically organize, tag, and find any kind of music you want, there's less need to manually break down music into larger categories for organization. Combine this with YouTube and social media dictating what's popular or has gone viral, and you end up with a generation of consumers that sees movies, fashion, movies, and culture more as a constantly moving trend than something that stays static for a long period of time.

jarjoura 9y ago

It's pretty amazing, I can watch a movie from 1997 and feel transformed to a different time. Also people went into rooms to use phones attached to the wall, and computers took up entire desks. Though funny enough, I think fashion from then is coming back in style. It was very clearly the last year before everyone got all caught up in 60s revival fashion with Austin Powers. I don't get that same feeling if I look at movies and photos from 2007. Everything looks the same as today.

squozzer 9y ago

I think in ye olden days there was a deliberate attempt by someone -- the shadowy world of cultural illuminati, maybe - to segment by decade, even though I never remember any directives saying, "It's now 1980 -- please burn all of your stuff that dates from 1979 or earlier."

andruby 9y ago

Here on Belgian radio, we call the music from 2000-2010 the "Nillies". As in "Back to the 90s & Nillies" [0]. As for 2010-2020, I'm sure we'll just call them the Dixies in a few years. [0] http://www.the90s.be/ http://www.the90s.be/