Cultural Trends this decade

The country's reassessment of torture and the rule of law is one of the saddening trends of the last decade. I would like to think most people in 1999 would have responded to the claim that in five years a majority of the country would be completely okay with kidnapping people, detaining them without charge or legal counsel indefinitely, and torturing them during that detention with unbelief and offense.

This wasn't too shocking if you were plugged in with technology. And I was just in middle school when I discovered emulation and roms. Music wasn't that far off. At the time hard drive space was the primary limiting factor, I could only keep so many albums at a time.

EDIT: From a technological perspective, the prominence of streaming video is much more shocking. Youtube would be a pipe dream at that point.

This is the decade of nostalgia. When my generation became young adults and we became sick of the wastefulness inherent in our society. This extends beyond garbage to re-using a lot of other past cultural elements our parents were into. Like New Wave music and 60s rock and jazz and old school hip hop, although once in our 20s we've pretty much finished with the 60s because white hard rock blues gets fucking old.

The 00s have been no more nostalgic than the 80s or 90s - I suspect you're just too young to remember. And I'm too young to remember how nostalgic the 70s were, but probably about the same. Pop culture nostalgia is largely the fault of a certain generation reaching the age at which they are in a position to control the media, so it's probably been happening for as long as there's been popular culture.

A friend of mine has a theory: you see hip retro-ness being applied in every decade to the one 20 years before. I think he may be right about that. Happy Days and Grease were all the rage in the 70's, w/ their 50's call backs. I recall there being a limitless fascination w/ the 60's in the 80's (although clear examples don't leap immediately to mind), and the 70's were suddenly almost as hip as they were when they were here for real in the 90's. I mean, who saw bell bottoms coming back? And predictably, there seems to be a lot of love for the 80's this dcade (lot of 80's themed radio shows, etc.). Although big hair and thin ties never made the comebacks I would have liked to have seen. If this trend continues, we'll see a resurgence of 90's nostalgia next decade. Except for Nirvana, I don't recall much worth reliving from that decade. I may just crawl under a rock and hide for 10 years, coming out only to chase kids offa my lawn.

I'm nostalgic for no wars and a prosperous economy. I'm all for that coming back.

You may be right - it's certainly logical, particularly what you said about a certain generation reaching to control the media at a certain age, if one makes this assumption - but I don't believe culture is manipulated like there are 'Overseers' who run, as an example, MTV or Pitchfork and judge what's to be popular and uncool at the time, to be accepted by the youth. To me, you could be expressing an impressively cynical, Orwellian view of modern Western culture, but I doubt young people loved the Beatles thanks to those in their 40s who controlled the media growing tired of...well, most of the music they had been familiar with for the past 40 years.

Now, MTV and Pitchfork are considered aspects of the 'tastemaking' media, but these media were, to begin with, watched and read because they seemed relevant to something that was happening. Consumerism doesn't create the initial product, it sells that innovation and tries to cash in again and again as often as it can until, finally, it is obvious the consumer wants something else.

I'm not trying to disprove that, say, a popular band like The Jam was influenced by 60s music (obviously they were indebted to much of it!), but today the culture is focused on what has been already sold, as in the creation of these sounds which are proven sellers; the cycle has stopped, because there is nowhere else to go, and because there's nowhere else to go, we're still buying the relatively same things (or downloading, stealing!) because, well, it's culture and we see these forms as some extremely vague heritage. Synth pop was one innovation of the 80s which has no equal in the aughts. Any creation that's unique of this time is the rearranging of past influences to create something new but wholly familiar (as with Girl Talk). The distinctions between rock and hip hop and other musical genres are further blurred by artists. Vinyl records are more appealing than CDs to us.