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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

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.