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Post by Deleted on Jan 13, 2021 3:56:56 GMT 10
I haven't reach much of the discussion yet, but it is waaay too early to be making pronouncements about whether the 2020s will have their own cultural identity. We're at the end of year 1 out of ten. Think of how much changed over the course of the 2010s, but then think of the time over which those changes took place. We've had discussions on these boards about how the 2000s culturally may have survived in some form or to some degree all the way up to 2012, so we have a ways to go before claiming the 2020s won't have their own unique identity.
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Post by SharksFan99 on Jan 13, 2021 19:33:57 GMT 10
I haven't reach much of the discussion yet, but it is waaay too early to be making pronouncements about whether the 2020s will have their own cultural identity. We're at the end of year 1 out of ten. Think of how much changed over the course of the 2010s, but then think of the time over which those changes took place. We've had discussions on these boards about how the 2000s culturally may have survived in some form or to some degree all the way up to 2012, so we have a ways to go before claiming the 2020s won't have their own unique identity. I don't see how we can truly draw comparisons with past decades. It would have been possible to do so in previous decades when physical media had a much greater penetration in our lives and on the trajectory of current culture, but that is no longer the case. Technologically speaking, we're in a different world to the one we were in back in 2010. Only 27% of mobile phone users in the US back in 2010 owned a smartphone device, music streaming only counted for 7% of the US market and "binge-watching" culture wasn't yet a thing. People don't engage with current pop culture in the exact same way as they did over a decade ago. That's not even taking into account the way in which the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed all of our lives. If anything, the pandemic has accelerated the decline of the traditional monocultural aspect of pop culture. There's going to be a time in the future when the idea of each retrospective decade having its only singular cultural identity is no longer possible; the 2020s are arguably the start of that. Think of it this way. There are 3.8 billion smartphone users in the world; that's close to half of the global population. At a single time, every one of those billions of people are going to be interacting with their smartphone device in a different way; some may be on social media, others may be streaming a show or movie on their phone. How can a decade develop its own singular cultural identity when the media and society in general has become so fragmented?
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Post by Deleted on Jan 15, 2021 8:30:22 GMT 10
I haven't reach much of the discussion yet, but it is waaay too early to be making pronouncements about whether the 2020s will have their own cultural identity. We're at the end of year 1 out of ten. Think of how much changed over the course of the 2010s, but then think of the time over which those changes took place. We've had discussions on these boards about how the 2000s culturally may have survived in some form or to some degree all the way up to 2012, so we have a ways to go before claiming the 2020s won't have their own unique identity. I don't see how we can truly draw comparisons with past decades. It would have been possible to do so in previous decades when physical media had a much greater penetration in our lives and on the trajectory of current culture, but that is no longer the case. Technologically speaking, we're in a different world to the one we were in back in 2010. Only 27% of mobile phone users in the US back in 2010 owned a smartphone device, music streaming only counted for 7% of the US market and "binge-watching" culture wasn't yet a thing. People don't engage with current pop culture in the exact same way as they did over a decade ago. That's not even taking into account the way in which the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed all of our lives. If anything, the pandemic has accelerated the decline of the traditional monocultural aspect of pop culture. There's going to be a time in the future when the idea of each retrospective decade having its only singular cultural identity is no longer possible; the 2020s are arguably the start of that. Think of it this way. There are 3.8 billion smartphone users in the world; that's close to half of the global population. At a single time, every one of those billions of people are going to be interacting with their smartphone device in a different way; some may be on social media, others may be streaming a show or movie on their phone. How can a decade develop its own singular cultural identity when the media and society in general has become so fragmented? Quite the contrary, I think that fragmentation is the very thing that produces distinct cultural identities within given decades. If everyone was consuming the same music, news, fashion, and literature in the '60s, we might not have gotten the hippies because mainstream culture quite simply couldn't have produced it. These subcultures or countercultures that define our decades come from fragmentation like what you're describing. Not to mention your analogy regarding smartphone users can easily be extended to TV ownership and Internet users in previous decades as well, and if anything those jumpstarted cultural changes that led to things like the creation of teen culture as a distinct from youth culture and meme culture as distinct from the 21st-century mainstream.
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Post by SharksFan99 on Jan 15, 2021 10:30:13 GMT 10
I don't see how we can truly draw comparisons with past decades. It would have been possible to do so in previous decades when physical media had a much greater penetration in our lives and on the trajectory of current culture, but that is no longer the case. Technologically speaking, we're in a different world to the one we were in back in 2010. Only 27% of mobile phone users in the US back in 2010 owned a smartphone device, music streaming only counted for 7% of the US market and "binge-watching" culture wasn't yet a thing. People don't engage with current pop culture in the exact same way as they did over a decade ago. That's not even taking into account the way in which the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed all of our lives. If anything, the pandemic has accelerated the decline of the traditional monocultural aspect of pop culture. There's going to be a time in the future when the idea of each retrospective decade having its only singular cultural identity is no longer possible; the 2020s are arguably the start of that. Think of it this way. There are 3.8 billion smartphone users in the world; that's close to half of the global population. At a single time, every one of those billions of people are going to be interacting with their smartphone device in a different way; some may be on social media, others may be streaming a show or movie on their phone. How can a decade develop its own singular cultural identity when the media and society in general has become so fragmented? Quite the contrary, I think that fragmentation is the very thing that produces distinct cultural identities within given decades. If everyone was consuming the same music, news, fashion, and literature in the '60s, we might not have gotten the hippies because mainstream culture quite simply couldn't have produced it. These subcultures or countercultures that define our decades come from fragmentation like what you're describing. Not to mention your analogy regarding smartphone users can easily be extended to TV ownership and Internet users in previous decades as well, and if anything those jumpstarted cultural changes that led to things like the creation of teen culture as a distinct from youth culture and meme culture as distinct from the 21st-century mainstream. There's a difference though between a diversity in pop culture and a fragmentation of people accessing/engaging with that culture. Would hippies have been as culturally significant had the majority of people owned smartphone devices or were choosing to stream their favourite shows on Netflix instead of watching the 6pm news? Part of the reason as for why it was so influential was due to the fact that the monoculture of the time allowed it to reach a greater number of people, and to create a longer-lasting impression on them. SJWs were more or less the counter-cultural group of people during the Trump Presidency in the late 2010s, but as a group, they never formed their own distinct aesthetics or culture (e.g music, movies) because the world was too fragmented for them to have done so.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 16, 2021 23:27:50 GMT 10
I think that it will be a lot easier for pop culture to be noticed and expand once live events aren't canceled every 5 minutes (or people actually able to enjoy their freetime) because of a massive pandemic. The early 2010s for instance were hurt by the recession but still are currently looked like a long lost eutopia because of how distinctive and free to be enjoyed pop culture was back then. The early 2020s in comparison are entirely crushed by the pandemic's weight and almost everything pop culture-wise currently is entirely related to it. Pandemic and a depression magnitudes upon magnitudes worse than the early 2010s recession. This is like the worst years of the Great Depression and the most optimistic economists believe it will be the late 2020s before there will be any kind of recovery. However, even in the Great Depression you could go to a bar. Cities had life. The 2020s are pretty much going to be that "nightmare" decade that people have been predicting at least my entire life.
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Post by daywatch on Jan 17, 2021 19:50:31 GMT 10
I can see everyone’s points and I agree somewhat, but you have to remember we just only entered the second year of the decade. 2000 & 2001 wasn’t all that different from the Late 90’s either when the decade first started. For all you know there could be dramatic changes that occur within the next few years, but I could definitely be wrong. Also a decade is harder to define when you’re still living in it rather than looking back.Unless you are culturally out of touch, then you can define a decade in the last 2 years of it.
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