2010s nostalgia

Anonus

I know this is probably WAY too early, but what will people remember most about this decade in 15-20 years?

My picks:

• Angry Birds
• Adventure Time
• Despicable Me
• Phineas & Ferb
• Gravity Falls
• pretty much any Disney/Pixar movie
• Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr

Klinotaxis

(assuming u mean euramericans)

angry birds doesn't seem sticky

probably not the syrian war. maybe bin laden

google having a shitload of "apps" and generally taking over the web

hopefully the ad model of web will die within the decade and we'll probably remember that bubble collapse more than other net things

criminalscum

People will blend the decade together with the 2000s.

I honestly can't tell the two apart.

Tre

• Regular Show (personally)
• MLP: FIM
• Heapers' Hangout
• possibly Kill la Kill

Miss Miko Mayonegg

I don't even care because Touhou.

Tre

oh, yeah

• Skrillex
• EDM (bluh) in general

Anonus

criminalscum said:

People will blend the decade together with the 2000s.

I honestly can't tell the two apart.

you'll be able to do so in a few years' time

glennmagusharvey

more like, we _won't_ be able to do so in a few years' time.

time runs together the farther we are from it

Anonus

what i meant is that the distinctions between the decades get clearer-cut as they go on

Previous Calica

the reality is that every decade actually runs five years into the next one

the 80s didn't end until 1995, the 90s until 2005, and we haven't actually exited the 2000s yet

Anonus

There's a lot of '90s stuff that hit before 1995 (e.g. grunge, The Simpsons, the Nicktoons)...

lee4hmz

Even that depends on the decade, and may be really subjective. The 1980s ended for me in 1991-1992, the 1980s itself was split into two parts (1980-1987 and 1987-1992), and the 1990s didn't end for me until, oh, 2007. :P

glennmagusharvey

"Decades" are entirely arbitrary anyway.

Things generally change on a continuum.  Maybe at different speeds, but still along a continuum.  "Decades" are only there as convenient signposts along which people draw lines.

So stop thinking in decades.  Start thinking in more functional groupings.

glennmagusharvey

so there was roughly this period of 2001 to 2008 that involved the war on terror stuff and roughly started with 9/11 and ended with the economic downturn

then starting with the economic downturn there has been a new period in time, roughly
this period has been characterized by more political instability, with the arab spring being a prime and dramatic example

lee4hmz

And before 2001, we had the 1990s economic boom, which started roughly in 1993-1995 with the rise of public Internet access.

Hexartes

Honestly I feel like the ambivalence towards the 00's and the 10's is somewhat unique. I mean, people pretty much "got" what the eighties were going to be like after about five years in.

Section42L

I'd say that, on a cultural level, the 2000s ended when Occupy Wall Street initiated.

Imipolex G

think about this all you want, Time's just gonna keep fuckin' with you

Previous Calica

Kexruct said:

Honestly I feel like the ambivalence towards the 00's and the 10's is somewhat unique. I mean, people pretty much "got" what the eighties were going to be like after about five years in.

do you have contemporary sources on that

Imipolex G

I remember 1985, we were as confused as ever

kindergarten was tough, man

MetaFour

I didn't know what the decade was going to be in 1985. I was one year old; I didn't know anything.

glennmagusharvey

On a broader scale, the era hasn't really changed much since the 90s, or even the 80s, except with the implementation of the internet as a worldwide public communication medium.

At least in the United States, there have been few, if any, major changes in the way we live:

• Our transportation technology and infrastructure -- still heavily dominated by cars for passengers and trucks for goods, with some train and air travel for long distances (and all this mostly fueled by fossil fuels), and only a smattering of bike and foot travel in dense urban areas.
• Our building construction and community planning methods -- still using the same contemporary styles of architecture, still thinking of building styles as decorative rather than functional, and still frequently motivated the desire to own single-family homes with drywalls and master suites and lawns and garages.
• Our sources of energy are still broadly dominated by fossil fuel sources, with a little nuclear and a bit of renewables here and there.  Power generation is still highly centralized -- it's still single power plants doing tons of generation and serving large numbers of customers.
• Our economic understanding is still roughly the same.  We're still looking at jobs numbers like we still have a labor-intensive manufacturing-based job market, and we're still measuring things in GDP.  And we're still talking about the "American Dream" (though this is changing a bit lately).
• Our foreign policy has changed a bit but people here and abroad still see the United States as a world-scale superpower, militarily and economically.  Which, let's be honest, it is.  And partly as a consequence of this, we're still grappling with many cases of intervention vs. non-intervention, based on lots of conflicting interests and aspirations.  The biggest change in this regard has been the shift from a territory-control-style thinking (the tradition of centuries of European and other wars through the Cold War) to thinking about non-state actors and terrorism after 9/11.
• Our political system is still dominated by two political parties.  The parties have become more polarized ideologically, and there are some ideological/cultural-political realignments going around the country, but this has not yet led to any dam-breaking moments such as one party becoming electorally irrelevant or being replaced by another or a many-party system emerging or anything.  And broadly speaking, we are still mainly politically stable, yet we still have lots of kinks in our system to iron out before we reach any ideals of liberty or equality that we aspire to.
• The only thing that's majorly changed is how the rise of the internet has led to greater exposure to information and creative media, and how that has caused various things like challenging the challenging (though still not toppling) the established media companies by lowering the barrier-to-entry for independent creation and publishing of information and media works, and many questions about legality and copyright and privacy, as well as what effects this might have on us culturally and psychologically.  That said, despite the dizzying amount of media available to us, we are still nowhere near a post-scarcity economy where our ideas can really be who we are and our contribution to society.

This is why I say nothing much has changed in the past three decades.

Tachyon

The culture of the Internet has changed substantially.  Through most of the 2000s, it was still mostly a geek thing.  It was only towards the end of the decade that sites like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube achieved the pop culture status they have now.

On the whole i think the distinctions between decades get less clear over time, not more so.  People remember the big historical events from the first half of the 20th century, but are pretty vague on what pop culture developments happened when.  The 19th century gets treated as a single moment, anything prior to that exists in mediaeval stasis until you get to really ancient times, and prehistoric species that existed in different eras are assumed to have lived side by side.

i think the only reason we distinguish so clearly between more recent decades is because we stereotype them.  Like a lot of what people remember of the sixties actually happened in the early 70s, and vice versa.

glennmagusharvey

It would be nice if our memory of the past did not decay logarithmically.