What an excellent post, whynotwriteme. I think we’re all aware, at one level or another, that we’re in a state of cultural mailaise. Everything is bland. Nothing truly exciting seems to loom on the horizon. We try to combat our desensitization by pursuing ever more coarse sensations: anger, violence, a celebration of social decay, the desire to pretend to change our gender by means of cosmetic surgery and hormone injections, nihilism and a glamorization of the trivial and the inconsequential (can you say “Kardashian”? Sure you can.). As Yeats wrote in “The Second Coming”: “The center cannot hold/The best lack all conviction/While the worst are filled with a passionate intensity”.
I think your points about social skills, and therefore society, eroding because techology allows people to insulate themselves from, and innure themselves to, their surroundings is astute. I think, however, there are one or two other factors that have led us to this zenith of technology intersecting with this nadir of culture.
The Baby Boom is collapsing. By the mid-90s, the youngest Baby Boomers had reached their mid-50s. The post-WWII Baby Boom was the most powerful cultural influence in US history. It even led to the notion of classifying history by decades, a notion that I think is dying out along with the Boomers. In the 50s, the Boomers were babies and children, so demand for more and better public education skyrocketed. The Boomers were teens in the 60s, and rock n’ roll became the dominant pop music form. The Boomers were terrified of dying in the Vietnam War and acted out their fear in acts of defiance against The Estsblishment, ranging from organized protests, disorganized riots, drug use and long hair on men. Flower Power tried to replace Gun Power. The Youth Movement culture carried over into the 70s to a large extent, especially the part about the drugs and, sometimes, about the high profits to be had from drug dealing. Not coincidentally, the Adult Entertainment industry
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R_Kane (15828)
5 years ago
edged its way into mainstream culture. The 70s also saw a slew of recent college graduate hustling to find college-level jobs in the most depressed US economy since the Depression. This manic pursuit of The Dollar led the Boomers into the 80s as Yuppies, not Yippies (The name for members of the radical Youth In Politics party of the 60s). It was the age of greed and excess, Dallas and Dynasty, huge hair and huge shoulder pads for fashionable ladies. Facing their mortality, the Boomers started jogging, playing rackeball and wearing leg warmers and headbands. Drugs were now being made by designers, and so were men’s underpants. Pong, the world’s first and most boring video game, was released.
The 90s happened mainly because the calander flipped to a new page. The Boomers didn’t really give a crap about Grunge. The Boomers now had kids of their own, and they were trying to keep them off drugs, in part because they feared the kids would snort up the Boomers’ stash.
And that brings us to where we are today. There is one other MAJOR cultural influence in the second half of the 20th century to consider. We’ve made a big deal about the Millennials being the first generation never to have known a world without computers. Consider this: for the first time in history, every person alive on this planet has lived in fear of nuclear war. One blink, one cough, and we’re all dust in the wind. It’s a depressing, petrifying awareness. So we no longer have a massive cultural influence coming from a single generation, and our hopes for tomorrow run smack up against the reality that there may be no tomorrow. Not the kind of conditions conducive to creating any more Defining Cultural Moments.
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OnanTheBarbarian (10969)
4 months ago
Portable phones killed it more than computers per se. However, this is not the end. Something unforeseen will replace phones, maybe zombies?
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