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August 31, 2006
What will the culture of the 2000s be remembered for?
I don't delude myself about my ability in cultural commentary, but it recently occurred to me that the present decade will probably not have a characteristic culture associated with it.
Each decade in recent memory has had something by which history will remember it. The 60's had free love and Vietnam, the 70's disco and funky hairdos, the 80's--well, ahem--MTV and the classic Mac, and the 90's, (uh... hmm... let's see...) the dot com boom and Monica Lewinsky. Perhaps this is a good time to read "New Kids on the Block", an exercise in armchair sociology whose conceptual framework I will borrow generously from--although I don't agree one bit with its conclusions--for the rest of this essay (take your time, I will wait). The 'naughty aughties', the name some give to the decade starting in 2001, is well past its halfway mark and the only things it has so far are the 9/11 attacks and various manifestations of the global war on terror--hardly something to give future generations the warm fuzzies.
Maybe I just can't think of something because I am living in this decade and I am too close to it. But even after setting aside every generation's usual neuroses about whether it will be remembered at all, and whether its life is not the most decadent and pointless, I believe there are a few good reasons 00's will not have a distinctive culture associated with them like the preceding decades.
It may seem that I am about to contradict what I just said, but I think more than anything else, the 00's is a decade of two things: irony and nostalgia. The 18-45 age bracket tends to set the de facto cultural tone of any given era because it produces and consumes media the most. This culturally significant bracket is largely occupied today by two generations: Generation X and the so-called millennial generation. Generation Xers like irony and the millennials like nostalgia.
Generation X's preference for irony is rooted in their characteristic pragmatic outlook, shaped to some degree as a reaction to baby boomer idealism. Satirical news shows like The Daily Show enjoy raging popularity, with a remarkably large percentage of the population tuning in to them for its regular news diet. Contrarian and somewhat counter-cultural periodicals like The Onion and Slate make telling statements about our time precisely because they highlight its virtues and follies by depicting their opposites.
The millennial generation, on the other hand is defined by the highly programmed lives its members lead, and their almost unquestioning worship of parents, teachers and other authority figures. This admiration manifests itself as nostalgia for the life and times of their boomer parents. The millennial generation frequents 50's-themed diners, 60's-themed bars and 70's-themed clubs, but has not yet been able to explicate any themes characteristic of its own decade. The millennials are a generation that remembers rather than sets its own tone. And as one cultural pundit pithily put it, you can't be remembered for remembering.
Notice how it got harder for me to come up with something that defined later decades relative to the earlier ones? It's not incidental. There won't be one major culture associated with this decade simply because there isn't one standard culture in the mainstream media anymore. Advances in media technologies have resulted in highly customizable content that has fragmented media consumers into several highly specific cliques. It is a lot more difficult for a few media to set the tone of a decade when dozens of underground subcultures nibble away at their spheres of influence. To use a culturally relevant buzzword, we live in decidedly long tail times, where we can infinitely customize our media experience. Unlike a teenager coming of age in the 1980's, a teenager who would come of age in the 2030's has the luxury of looking back at hip hop culture, Latino culture and Asian culture in addition to the white American culture of the past generation. It is culturally empowering and enriching to have more than one mainstream culture to turn to when finding oneself, but it also makes it harder to pick cultural archetypes for a time.
There's nothing wrong with living in a decade defined by irony, nostalgia and a fragmented media. In fact, it is quite a lot of fun nostalgically recreating the lives of previous generations while, ironically enough, not having to face their challenges. The only problem with irony and nostalgia is that they need something else in terms of which they are defined, such as the living conditions of earlier generations. This dependence on something else renders them quite unsuitable for being the pillars of aughties culture.
I want my generation to be distinctly remembered somehow though, so I hope for my own sake that I am wrong about the above. I hope that the generations of this decade will somehow combine their panache for infinite customization with their wallowing in irony and nostalgia to create a way of being remembered by future generations. After all, the more things change, the more they remain the same.
Posted by Vishy at August 31, 2006 10:57 PM