7 ms·

> The symptoms of pop culture: A “disdain for history”. Pop cultures believe history doesn’t have anything to teach them. This almost completely falls to piece

> The symptoms of pop culture: A “disdain for history”. Pop cultures believe history doesn’t have anything to teach them. This almost completely falls to pieces in the framing ... how does one explain the pop culture of 80s nostalgia that is prevalent in a lot of media? An 80's casio watch is, in some circles, the pinacle of timepiece fashion. Of course there are times where pop culture is a rejection of the prior art, but also there are times when current pop culture icons show deference to the past and their influences.

pif 4y ago
Calling 40 years ago “history” is actually “disdain for history”. History is not what you can find at an older cousin's place. History is what someone had to make an effort to save for you, and you cannot experience it any more.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  When I was in 8th grade in 2007 our history book ended with a chapter on 9/11. History is the past and even history forums tend to say anything more than a generation ago is history.
- blitzar 4y ago
  Here is a perfectly preserved sony walkman from 1987 - maximum effort and all. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O315300/walkman-personal-radio-cassette-sony-corporation/ https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O315300/walkman-personal-...
- 3-cheese-sundae 4y ago
  There is a lot that occurred 40 years ago that can no longer be experienced, or even known by anyone today. Wouldn't refusing to call it history be disdain for history?
- dimitrios1 4y ago
  History is simply what we chose to remember and how we remember it. There's no minimum length it needs to be in the past. A "historical moment" can happen in the present.
- namaria 4y ago
  The whole 'history repeats itself' really rang true to me when I was reading on the birth of the roman empire, about when the republic fell (not the last decade, the full history) and I realized much of what we see happening in American politics is not new. The big outrageous personalities, the moral pleas, the manipulation of public opinion, the principled vs the pragmatic. All of that resonates across the centuries. But, alas, as they say... those who don't know history are condemned to repeat, while those who know are condemned to watch other repeating it.
  - sirspacey 4y ago
    I question the implication of this common assertion - how does knowing history change the repetitive nature and outcomes of human systems?
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    Some writing on why the US and Rome are completely different: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19mi71/how_valid_is_the_analogy_between_modern_day_usa/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19mi71/how_v... https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ir3jm/in_what_ways_are_the_roman_empire_and_the_united/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ir3jm/in_wh...
    - namaria 4y ago
      The fact that they are completely different contexts, yet we can see patterns in behavior repeating themselves, is what makes this interesting.
      - satvikpendem 4y ago
        Not really. As said in those posts, just because there are superficial ostensible patterns does not mean that they are useful, or even real.
        namaria 4y ago
- thewebcount 4y ago
  I recently had a conversation with an archeologist. She said that she regularly gets calls from the local government because they're out digging up some ground and have found items that are around 50 years old. Apparently that's the legal cutoff, and they're required to get it checked out by an archeologist if they think it's that age or older. So yeah, history is definitely in that range.
Karawebnetwork 4y ago
Copy the image of versus incorporate the essence of. We wear a Casio because it looks retro, but we check our phones for the time. We have a cassette player in our house, but we use a Bluetooth cassette to play MP3s on it. We put a 3D-printed Sony Walkman phone case around our iPhones instead of digging out the real thing and enjoying the original media with all its perks and problems. I would use tea as an example. We can drink a modern aluminum can of iced tea that contains 50 ingredients, none of which is tea, or we can take it slow and do a complete traditional tea ritual. One is loosely inspired by the past, the other is immersing yourself in tradition. The floppy disk save icon comes to mind.
- ghostpepper 4y ago
  Curious what icon you would replace it with
  - Karawebnetwork 4y ago
    Nostalgia is not always negative, and I didn't mean to imply that it needs to be replaced. Everyone knows that the icon stands for "Save" even if they don't know where it came from. In a recent tweet from Japan, younger people wonder why the "Save" button in Excel is a vending machine with a drink in the tray. Another popular tweet shows a child wondering why their parents 3D printed a save button. In both cases, they understood the icon stood for save without knowing what it was. As for your question, I would either use a circle with an arrow in it or an open box with an arrow in it. Perhaps a cloud with an arrow if it's saving to the cloud. Another alternative is a bookmark style icon (but then you need to ask: will the future generations experience physical books at all?) However, I'm not a UI/UX expert, and this might clash with the Download button, so you'd have to ask whether or not the distinction is important in your own application. Keeping the convention of a mysterious floppy disk might still be the right choice.
jasmer 4y ago
Casio watches are not 'cool' because they are useful and cheap as they always were - they are fetishized as a 'fashion'. If we were all just 'wearing them because they made sense' then yes, but they are specifically objectified as thing of adornment. It's mostly not about the past. That guy who is still wearing the Casio because he always 'just did' - that's not pop culture. There's nothing wrong with pop culture and it has many positive attributes, change is needed. It'd be boring without change. That said it can obviously be carried away. Pruning is also healthy for the org in many ways, especially if it allows for adaptation and change. It obviously has some negative externalizations for individuals which is not nice.
rjknight 4y ago
Superficial imitation is not the same thing as deep understanding. Nostalgia for the past isn't the same as respect for the lessons that it can teach us. A real understanding of history is one that can teach you something important about the present.
croes 4y ago
That's retro fashion. I doubt that most wearers think the Casio is the superior watch compared to nowadays smartwatches
- blitzar 4y ago
  It has a better battery, the little solar panel thing means I dont need to put it on a magnet every night. It keeps the time just as well. The metal band is the same one that a premium smart watch comes with, and it also comes with an smart advanced "notifications off" setting - such that it is litterally impossible to get an errant notificaion in the middle of an important meeting.
googlryas 4y ago
The persistent retro mimicry across decades is just an exercise in stereotyping, not born out of any appreciation for history. A Casio in the 80s was cutting edge consumer tech in a sense. A Casio watch today has a totally different vibe.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  It's like Synthwave, which was never a thing in the 80s. It's a modern reinvention of how people assume the 80s felt, filtered through a gauzy haze of nostalgia for an imaginary pop culture that never existed in that form. Which is similar to computing and other tech nostalgia. An Amiga was out there on the edge in the 80s, now it's a source of fond reminiscence. Likewise 1980s music equipment, especially synthesizers. The modern anti-pop-culture equivalent would be asking what's out on the edge today. And there isn't much, because the vibe of computing - actually the vibe of everything - has changed from excited exploration and boundary breaking with constant invention and surprises, to backward-looking and derivative commoditised corporate consumption and collectorism, and the generation of content and items for same. The most innovative thing at the moment - AI - is an evolving set of automated systems for summarising what has already been generated, rather than for generating something completely new from out of left field.
  - ben7799 4y ago
    The Amiga is such a perfect example. I grew up in the 80s in a software engineering household and all my parents friends were likewise engineers in the computer industry. So I grew up and ended up in the industry too. I was around lots and lots of different computers that were not common in the 80s due to being a "tailgate" kid into facilities. And yet I've still never seen an Amiga in person I think, and I have never had a "IRL" friend who ever had one either. And yet you'd think from nostalgia that we all had them in the 80s.
    - googlryas 4y ago
      (in the style of manya, Seinfeld's elderly relation): I had an Amiga!
gspencley 4y ago
I'm old enough to have seen this as a fashion trend unto itself. If you go back and watch TV shows from the 80s, you'll see a lot of 50s nostalgia. In the 90s, it was the 60s that was being fetishized. They even brought back Woodstock, twice. I was in high school in the 90s and "hippie fashion" was very popular. Tie dyed shirts came back etc. In the 2000s the 70s were in. We had TV shows like That 70s Show etc. Then it was the 80s, and now 90s nostalgia is starting to come in. It's the cycle of aging. All the kids and teenagers from those decades are now middle aged and they want to consume nostalgia. If they had kids in their 20s, then those kids are now teenagers and young adults and are becoming curious about their parents lived experiences and all the things that they just missed out on (during the 00s I was very interested in the 70s since that decade happened right before I was born). But this is a specific exception, not the rule. Middle aged consumers are not the trend-setting hipsters who create new fashion trends (the stuff that they will fetishize when they are middle age). What's really ironic, though, is that in tech there really isn't much that is new. Even AI/ML was being researched as far back as the 1940s, we had working proof of concepts in the 80s. We knew how to do this stuff ages ago, and had practical applications. We just needed the hardware and data accessibility to catch up so that we have the storage and computing to actually train these things. Every advancement over the last 20 years has been small incremental refinements. The big stuff is not new. But the industry still fetishizes it like it's new. "Cloud" is just resource sharing. We're back to mainframes, complete with the vendor lock-in caused by proprietary APIs. And yet it is branded, marketed and fetishized as if it's "new." OOP is soooo passe. We tried that in the 90s and 00s and there were ... gasp... problems! People wrote buggy and difficult to maintain code. Enter Functional Programming and now this is the way that we do things. It's impossible to write bad code in this paradigm ... right?! Relational databases are slow and complicated and require DBAs to maintain. In comes NoSQL and key/value doc-stores ... now THIS is the way we do things. You can't develop a bad product using a doc store database ... right?! Restful APIs require strong collaboration between backend and frontend developers and simple, single-purpose contracts aren't very flexible. In comes GraphQL now ALL web apps need to use it because you can't develop a difficult to maintain application using GraphQL .. .right!? This is the point of the article and after 25 years in the industry I have a hard time finding the lie.
oscillonoscope 4y ago
I think it's better to treat the author's definition as separate from the traditional understanding of pop culture. It seems like they really want to talk about an idea they have and are assigning a new definition to an old term.
p0pcult 4y ago
>how does one explain the pop culture of 80s nostalgia The fact that people who were teens in this era are a desirable market segment with a lot of purchasing power, and nostalgia works. If it were anything about the actual historical value, then the 80s references would last. But they won't. Before the 80s nostalgia it was "That 70s Show." Prior to that, it was "The Wonder Years" (set in the late 1960s/early 70s) And before that, it was "Happy Days" (50s/early 60s). It's all a cash grab, plucking on the heart strings of the people who were at the apex of their earning power.
hot_gril 4y ago
Usually, pop culture means for young people. 80s nostalgia is for people born in the 70s.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Not necessarily. There are movements for 90s nostalgia from people who did not exist in the 90s. It's a sort of fake or retrograde nostalgia, possibly from seeing their parents.
- thewebcount 4y ago
  I mean Taylor Swift had an album that was titled 1989 (the year she was born), and you can pretty much draw a straight line from Toni Basil's rendition of "Oh Mickey" to "Shake It Off". I think her audience tends to be fairly young, and they ate it up.
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    Taylor Swift reused an all-around decent sounding genre that wasn't overdone in the 2010s, with some changes for modern times. It's not the nostalgia that sells it. The majority of actual 1980s pop music would probably rarely be replayed today, just some hits survive. You might find the biggest divide asking gen Z vs millennials what they think about the movie reboots. A few of those are done well and have their own merits, but most rely totally on the nostalgia factor.
totemandtoken 4y ago
Respecting the aesthetics of history is not the same thing as having respect for history

pif 4y ago

Calling 40 years ago “history” is actually “disdain for history”. History is not what you can find at an older cousin's place. History is what someone had to make an effort to save for you, and you cannot experience it any more.

edgyquant 4y ago
When I was in 8th grade in 2007 our history book ended with a chapter on 9/11. History is the past and even history forums tend to say anything more than a generation ago is history.
blitzar 4y ago
Here is a perfectly preserved sony walkman from 1987 - maximum effort and all. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O315300/walkman-personal-radio-cassette-sony-corporation/ https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O315300/walkman-personal-...
3-cheese-sundae 4y ago
There is a lot that occurred 40 years ago that can no longer be experienced, or even known by anyone today. Wouldn't refusing to call it history be disdain for history?
dimitrios1 4y ago
History is simply what we chose to remember and how we remember it. There's no minimum length it needs to be in the past. A "historical moment" can happen in the present.
namaria 4y ago
The whole 'history repeats itself' really rang true to me when I was reading on the birth of the roman empire, about when the republic fell (not the last decade, the full history) and I realized much of what we see happening in American politics is not new. The big outrageous personalities, the moral pleas, the manipulation of public opinion, the principled vs the pragmatic. All of that resonates across the centuries. But, alas, as they say... those who don't know history are condemned to repeat, while those who know are condemned to watch other repeating it.
- sirspacey 4y ago
  I question the implication of this common assertion - how does knowing history change the repetitive nature and outcomes of human systems?
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Some writing on why the US and Rome are completely different: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19mi71/how_valid_is_the_analogy_between_modern_day_usa/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19mi71/how_v... https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ir3jm/in_what_ways_are_the_roman_empire_and_the_united/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ir3jm/in_wh...
  - namaria 4y ago
    The fact that they are completely different contexts, yet we can see patterns in behavior repeating themselves, is what makes this interesting.
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      Not really. As said in those posts, just because there are superficial ostensible patterns does not mean that they are useful, or even real.
      - namaria 4y ago
thewebcount 4y ago
I recently had a conversation with an archeologist. She said that she regularly gets calls from the local government because they're out digging up some ground and have found items that are around 50 years old. Apparently that's the legal cutoff, and they're required to get it checked out by an archeologist if they think it's that age or older. So yeah, history is definitely in that range.

Karawebnetwork 4y ago

Copy the image of versus incorporate the essence of. We wear a Casio because it looks retro, but we check our phones for the time. We have a cassette player in our house, but we use a Bluetooth cassette to play MP3s on it. We put a 3D-printed Sony Walkman phone case around our iPhones instead of digging out the real thing and enjoying the original media with all its perks and problems. I would use tea as an example. We can drink a modern aluminum can of iced tea that contains 50 ingredients, none of which is tea, or we can take it slow and do a complete traditional tea ritual. One is loosely inspired by the past, the other is immersing yourself in tradition. The floppy disk save icon comes to mind.

ghostpepper 4y ago
Curious what icon you would replace it with
- Karawebnetwork 4y ago
  Nostalgia is not always negative, and I didn't mean to imply that it needs to be replaced. Everyone knows that the icon stands for "Save" even if they don't know where it came from. In a recent tweet from Japan, younger people wonder why the "Save" button in Excel is a vending machine with a drink in the tray. Another popular tweet shows a child wondering why their parents 3D printed a save button. In both cases, they understood the icon stood for save without knowing what it was. As for your question, I would either use a circle with an arrow in it or an open box with an arrow in it. Perhaps a cloud with an arrow if it's saving to the cloud. Another alternative is a bookmark style icon (but then you need to ask: will the future generations experience physical books at all?) However, I'm not a UI/UX expert, and this might clash with the Download button, so you'd have to ask whether or not the distinction is important in your own application. Keeping the convention of a mysterious floppy disk might still be the right choice.

jasmer 4y ago

Casio watches are not 'cool' because they are useful and cheap as they always were - they are fetishized as a 'fashion'. If we were all just 'wearing them because they made sense' then yes, but they are specifically objectified as thing of adornment. It's mostly not about the past. That guy who is still wearing the Casio because he always 'just did' - that's not pop culture. There's nothing wrong with pop culture and it has many positive attributes, change is needed. It'd be boring without change. That said it can obviously be carried away. Pruning is also healthy for the org in many ways, especially if it allows for adaptation and change. It obviously has some negative externalizations for individuals which is not nice.

rjknight 4y ago

Superficial imitation is not the same thing as deep understanding. Nostalgia for the past isn't the same as respect for the lessons that it can teach us. A real understanding of history is one that can teach you something important about the present.

croes 4y ago

That's retro fashion. I doubt that most wearers think the Casio is the superior watch compared to nowadays smartwatches

blitzar 4y ago
It has a better battery, the little solar panel thing means I dont need to put it on a magnet every night. It keeps the time just as well. The metal band is the same one that a premium smart watch comes with, and it also comes with an smart advanced "notifications off" setting - such that it is litterally impossible to get an errant notificaion in the middle of an important meeting.

googlryas 4y ago

The persistent retro mimicry across decades is just an exercise in stereotyping, not born out of any appreciation for history. A Casio in the 80s was cutting edge consumer tech in a sense. A Casio watch today has a totally different vibe.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
It's like Synthwave, which was never a thing in the 80s. It's a modern reinvention of how people assume the 80s felt, filtered through a gauzy haze of nostalgia for an imaginary pop culture that never existed in that form. Which is similar to computing and other tech nostalgia. An Amiga was out there on the edge in the 80s, now it's a source of fond reminiscence. Likewise 1980s music equipment, especially synthesizers. The modern anti-pop-culture equivalent would be asking what's out on the edge today. And there isn't much, because the vibe of computing - actually the vibe of everything - has changed from excited exploration and boundary breaking with constant invention and surprises, to backward-looking and derivative commoditised corporate consumption and collectorism, and the generation of content and items for same. The most innovative thing at the moment - AI - is an evolving set of automated systems for summarising what has already been generated, rather than for generating something completely new from out of left field.
- ben7799 4y ago
  The Amiga is such a perfect example. I grew up in the 80s in a software engineering household and all my parents friends were likewise engineers in the computer industry. So I grew up and ended up in the industry too. I was around lots and lots of different computers that were not common in the 80s due to being a "tailgate" kid into facilities. And yet I've still never seen an Amiga in person I think, and I have never had a "IRL" friend who ever had one either. And yet you'd think from nostalgia that we all had them in the 80s.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    (in the style of manya, Seinfeld's elderly relation): I had an Amiga!

gspencley 4y ago

I'm old enough to have seen this as a fashion trend unto itself. If you go back and watch TV shows from the 80s, you'll see a lot of 50s nostalgia. In the 90s, it was the 60s that was being fetishized. They even brought back Woodstock, twice. I was in high school in the 90s and "hippie fashion" was very popular. Tie dyed shirts came back etc. In the 2000s the 70s were in. We had TV shows like That 70s Show etc. Then it was the 80s, and now 90s nostalgia is starting to come in. It's the cycle of aging. All the kids and teenagers from those decades are now middle aged and they want to consume nostalgia. If they had kids in their 20s, then those kids are now teenagers and young adults and are becoming curious about their parents lived experiences and all the things that they just missed out on (during the 00s I was very interested in the 70s since that decade happened right before I was born). But this is a specific exception, not the rule. Middle aged consumers are not the trend-setting hipsters who create new fashion trends (the stuff that they will fetishize when they are middle age). What's really ironic, though, is that in tech there really isn't much that is new. Even AI/ML was being researched as far back as the 1940s, we had working proof of concepts in the 80s. We knew how to do this stuff ages ago, and had practical applications. We just needed the hardware and data accessibility to catch up so that we have the storage and computing to actually train these things. Every advancement over the last 20 years has been small incremental refinements. The big stuff is not new. But the industry still fetishizes it like it's new. "Cloud" is just resource sharing. We're back to mainframes, complete with the vendor lock-in caused by proprietary APIs. And yet it is branded, marketed and fetishized as if it's "new." OOP is soooo passe. We tried that in the 90s and 00s and there were ... gasp... problems! People wrote buggy and difficult to maintain code. Enter Functional Programming and now this is the way that we do things. It's impossible to write bad code in this paradigm ... right?! Relational databases are slow and complicated and require DBAs to maintain. In comes NoSQL and key/value doc-stores ... now THIS is the way we do things. You can't develop a bad product using a doc store database ... right?! Restful APIs require strong collaboration between backend and frontend developers and simple, single-purpose contracts aren't very flexible. In comes GraphQL now ALL web apps need to use it because you can't develop a difficult to maintain application using GraphQL .. .right!? This is the point of the article and after 25 years in the industry I have a hard time finding the lie.

oscillonoscope 4y ago

I think it's better to treat the author's definition as separate from the traditional understanding of pop culture. It seems like they really want to talk about an idea they have and are assigning a new definition to an old term.

p0pcult 4y ago

>how does one explain the pop culture of 80s nostalgia The fact that people who were teens in this era are a desirable market segment with a lot of purchasing power, and nostalgia works. If it were anything about the actual historical value, then the 80s references would last. But they won't. Before the 80s nostalgia it was "That 70s Show." Prior to that, it was "The Wonder Years" (set in the late 1960s/early 70s) And before that, it was "Happy Days" (50s/early 60s). It's all a cash grab, plucking on the heart strings of the people who were at the apex of their earning power.

hot_gril 4y ago

Usually, pop culture means for young people. 80s nostalgia is for people born in the 70s.

satvikpendem 4y ago
Not necessarily. There are movements for 90s nostalgia from people who did not exist in the 90s. It's a sort of fake or retrograde nostalgia, possibly from seeing their parents.
thewebcount 4y ago
I mean Taylor Swift had an album that was titled 1989 (the year she was born), and you can pretty much draw a straight line from Toni Basil's rendition of "Oh Mickey" to "Shake It Off". I think her audience tends to be fairly young, and they ate it up.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  Taylor Swift reused an all-around decent sounding genre that wasn't overdone in the 2010s, with some changes for modern times. It's not the nostalgia that sells it. The majority of actual 1980s pop music would probably rarely be replayed today, just some hits survive. You might find the biggest divide asking gen Z vs millennials what they think about the movie reboots. A few of those are done well and have their own merits, but most rely totally on the nostalgia factor.

totemandtoken 4y ago

Respecting the aesthetics of history is not the same thing as having respect for history