
Decades - nikbackm
https://xkcd.com/1849/
======
sputknick
Is it just me getting old, or has fashion not changed much since 2000? I was
watching Road Trip the other day and thought "these clothes are basically what
kids wear today". Watching a movie from 1980 in 2000, the clothes would have
looked foreign. This may not sound like a Hacker News topic, but does this
signal some type of cultural equilibrium? Could it be that in a connected
world there's less reason to stand out in your dress?

~~~
mortenjorck
It's not just you getting old:
[http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-
style-2...](http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-201201)

~~~
irrational
"Look through a current fashion or architecture magazine or listen to 10
random new pop songs; if you didn’t already know they were all things from the
2010s, I guarantee you couldn’t tell me with certainty they weren’t from the
2000s or 1990s or 1980s or even earlier."

The other day I was in the car with my 17 year old and a song came on the
radio from the late 90s and she thought it was a new song. I didn't laugh
because I've noticed the sameness to pop music myself and if I hadn't lived
through it I probably couldn't tell either.

~~~
ConceptJunkie
I've considered that this is true as well, but since I am extremely unfamiliar
with pop music since the early 90s, I assumed that could also be the case as
well.

On the other hand, if you were to play me an unfamiliar song from about 1965
to about 1980, I can, with pretty good accuracy, narrow down its release to
within a year or two just by its sound. It's a game I like to play with the
SiriusXM radio channel.

There's no doubt that pop music has become a lot more homogenized in the past
couple decades, and the technological advances that drastically alter the
sound of music are becoming fewer and fewer. Has there really been anything
other than (the scourge of) Autotune that's really affected the sound of music
in the past 20 years? The only other thing I can think of is digital sampling,
which hit like a tidal wave around 1983-4.

However, I must vehemently disagree that you wouldn't immediately recognize
something from the 80s. The sounds and styles of music in the 80s were much
more distinct. Even my kids, who were born in the 90s, can immediately
recognize song from the 80s by their sound.

~~~
maxerickson
The loudness war.

Digital equipment also increased the amount of material with very high
production values.

------
andrenotgiant
During the 90s, did people refer to present day trends as "[90s ___]"?

People have started using "2000s" to describe the 2000-2010 decade. For
example: "music of the 2000s"
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=music%20...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=music%20of%20the%202000s,music%20of%20the%2090s)

But that only became necessary in the past few years, before that you could
just call it "pop music"

I think decades blur together enough that it takes a few years before people
are comfortable generalizing them into a single term.

~~~
nothis
I have two theories. On the one hand, it seems like people tend to be
hopelessly bored with the "last decade" (people only started giving a shit
about the 90s like 5 years ago). On the other, I find decades to have become
more and more boring since the 60s.

The 60s invented _so much_ (I'd argue youth/pop culture and the very "decade"
category itself). The 70s had bellbottom pants and disco music (it's more of a
pity-category that we even bother to name it). The 80s at least had MTV. The
90s... it's "my" decade, in a way, but I already struggle to even come up with
stuff. It's like an off-brand 80s. The 2000s? Heck, did anything even happen
in the 2000s? 9/11? MySpace? ...? It's hard to objectively judge stuff you're
currently in but the 2010s look boring as _fuck_ right now. Like, I couldn't
come up with a single thing, culturally, the 2010s should be remembered for.
Hipsters? They're just stealing everything cool from previous decades!

I feel like one of the other posters here is right: Pop culture is becoming
less and less homogeneous, it's just picking what you like from any source you
like. It's remixes of remixes and weird niche stuff celebrated for 3 months
before people move on to the next shit. 10 years might simply be way too long
to stay consistent, nowadays, while the smaller changes are too subtle to
matter as a "category".

~~~
soulchild
In the 90s, Techno/Rave music became big, forever changing the music
landscape. And of course the Internet started to go mainstream.

------
noonespecial
My little daughter watches MacGuyver, Hannah Montana, the A Team and Jessie
all back to back without a second thought.

She loves The Beatles and LFO.

The internet smeared culture all over the surface of life like wet paint.

The "generation gap" is dead and buried.

~~~
chasing
Yeah, I think people don't realize that the extreme variation in culture over
the decades of the 20th century was due, in part, to the fact that older media
simply wasn't available. Think of the 70s. Want to watch a TV show from the
60s? You're SOL. Maybe you can find records from bands of that era, but want
to see fashion trends from a decade earlier? What do you do? Dig up old
magazines in the library? Want to watch an old movie? Better hope it turns up
on TV or as a rerelease in theaters. Culture really did exist in this
relatively narrow window of just a few years.

That's completely gone, now, and I just don't think we're going to see these
dramatic decade-tagged cultural shifts any more.

~~~
ConceptJunkie
I have to wonder if you actually lived in the 70s because what you are
describing is simply untrue. TV reruns were a huge thing, especially during
the day. As a kid in the 1970s, I was deeply familiar with a lot of TV from
the 50s and 60s. When we got cable in the mid-70s this became even more true.
Syndicated shows and reruns ruled the airwaves. There was no lack of exposure
to earlier decades through television.

Now in terms of movies, what you're saying is a little more true, but a lot of
movies were aired on network TV, so eventually you would see a lot of the big
ones. HBO was around in the 1970s as well, so there was an opportunity to see
lots of movies that way as well.

xkcd's thesis seems to be premised on the idea that there are no catchy, and
widely accepted, names for this decade and the previous one.

I've considered the same question and decided that music, fashion and other
cultural touchstones are becoming less distinct from decade to decade than
they were going back to the last century.

However, I've also considered that it may be the case that I'm simply less
aware of the details of pop culture than I was 20+ years ago. I can hear a
piece of music from 1965 to about 1980 that I'm not familiar with and pin it
down to within a year or two just by its sound. Maybe it's possible to do that
with music from the last 20 years, but I certainly can't do it.

~~~
chasing
I was born in the 70s, but was not old enough to remember them directly -- so
I'll defer to your direct experience. Of course there wasn't zero access to
media from other decades -- but I remember in the 80s and even 90s cultural
access was very, very different. I could access an album from the 70s, but I'd
have to go buy it. Or borrow it from a friend and give it back. I could see
reruns on TV, but only certain TV shows and definitely not on-demand. (Or I'd
have to go rent, which, again, limited access.)

> I can hear a piece of music from 1965 to about 1980 that I'm not familiar
> with and pin it down to within a year or two just by its sound. Maybe it's
> possible to do that with music from the last 20 years, but I certainly can't
> do it.

I also think some of what you're describing re musical trends is related to
the above: Artists have a million outlets and tens of millions of tracks at
their disposal to be influenced by, so the idea that there's a "sound of the
year" as promoted by major labels and radio stations is just... gone. It's not
like Justin Bieber songs are playing everywhere. He's a huge celebrity
musician and I still would have to go out of my way to hear one of his songs.
They just don't permeate my media sphere. Again, compared to the 90s when a
hit song would be unavoidable.

Anyway: I don't think it's the sole cause. I think labelling decades was also
simply a branding and marketing trend that has fallen out of vogue, maybe due
in part to the simple problem of what to call the "aughties."

It's an interesting topic! I love the media environment today. God. When I was
first tinkering with music in the 90s I would've killed for access to things
like Spotify and SoundCloud. So amazing.

------
mortenjorck
Munroe's linguistic hypothesis is interesting and may prove valid, but I think
what we're seeing is likely due to deeper cultural shifts. William Gibson's
circa-2010 observation that "the present is really of no width whatever" hints
at a more atomized popular concept of time and the dissolution of the concept
of the regular, periodic structure of decades in the 20th century.

I wouldn't be surprised if by the mid-2020s we've more or less abandoned the
concept of decades in favor of an ad-hoc system of domain-based periods
loosely defined within cultural groups - I'd say to some degree, we're doing
that already.

~~~
ConceptJunkie
I think you're right as well. A lot of the distinctiveness of sounds in
popular music were driven by improvements in technology in the 60s through the
80s or 90s, but that's no longer the case. The same can be said about movies
up to the last several years.

With the exception of (the scourge of) Autotune, has any technology really
changed how music sounds since the tidal wave of digital sampling in the early
to mid 80s?

Similarly, the massive advances in computer graphics have radically altered
movie making in the 80s through 2010 or so, but those advances are becoming
much less noticeable from year to year.

------
BjoernKW
I think there's a larger cultural phenomenon at play here.

Perhaps it's just me or or maybe my generation (those born in the late 70s)
has a somewhat unique perspective on this but I think there were 3 pivotal
developments around the end of the 80s / the beginning of the 90s:

\- the fall of the Iron Curtain

\- the advent of the World Wide Web and widespread use of personal computers
and the internet

\- globalisation becoming a considerable and perceptible factor in everyday
life (mainly due to developments #1 and #2)

These developments to some extent caused cultural perceptions and distinctions
- both spatial and temporal - to blur.

In my personal perception the 80s are still just 10 years ago.

~~~
dpark
> _In my personal perception the 80s are still just 10 years ago_

I think it's got less to do with any world events and more to do with the fact
that you reached adulthood around then. The mid-80s were about 10 years before
you graduated. The 90s started 10 years before I graduated, so that's my "10
years ago" point. Meanwhile the people born right after I graduated are about
to reach adulthood, which feels like an impossible reality.

------
a_humean
I think its actually a more substantial shift. With media being so accessible
it almost feels that the generational cultural gap is blurring and narrowing.
I have access within moments the entire popular culture catalog of music,
films, and TV shows going back decades. There seems to be a great convergence
and preservation of culture. I'm as likely to listen to 60s & 70s David Bowie
as I am to listen to the new Arcade Fire album coming out later this year.

The past two decades almost seem to blur into each other culturally. People
basically dress exactly as they did 20 years ago as far as I can tell. Maybe
that's because these two decades and the coming decade are my prime years and
so I lack perceptive as a late 20 something who is still neither quite young
nor yet middle aged.

~~~
ashark
Something lost on second-half-of-millenial-generation and up will be just how
_inaccessible_ media was, even well into the 90s. Movies took years to be
released on video. What you could buy was mostly whatever the local stores
chose to stock. You'd probably not even know about all kinds of media because
it never showed up anywhere you could see it, unless you read lots of
industry/medium specific magazines or something. Music? Hope your record/CD
store has it or will order it. TV show? Didn't record it when it aired? Gone.
You can watch TV Guide and try to catch a rerun. In a few years maybe it'll be
one of a handful of episodes released on VHS (full seasons? LOL no, or
_incredibly_ expensive in the unlikely event that they are released). Want to
see some family photos from someone across the country? Call them, oh they're
out, leave a message on their answering machine that you'd like them to go get
prints made and mail them to you. You may see them in a month. You'll have no
idea what you're getting until they show up, unless you've seen them in person
before.

And shortly before that, it was even worse. Home releases of movies? Haha,
what's that? _Maybe_ a super-expensive 16mm print will be available at some
point for home projectors.

A short while ago mass media was far more ephemeral and inaccessible than it
is now. Before that it didn't really exist, outside print. Want to hear music?
Know anyone who can play it? No? You're out of luck. Better learn an
instrument. Film? What's that? Maybe you can catch a stage show at the local
harvest festival. Maybe your kids will stage something in the living room.
That'd be nice.

We're not _that_ far removed from those times. This has been a huge shift in
people's relations to one another (to paraphrase Vonnegut, people's small
artistic talents used to be very valuable to their friends, family, and
community, but they're now in competition with the best in the world,
rendering any expression of those talents low-value and eccentric) and to
media itself. We've gained a lot, but more than a little's been lost.
Sometimes it feels like we're drowning in media, and I'm not sure the trade-
off of being able to watch Hogan's Heroes or whatever at a moment's notice
rather than waiting for a rerun is entirely worth centering our lives on
screens and speakers so completely.

~~~
crazybigdan
I think this is right on. I listen to quite a bit of music and I have said
several times to friends something like "I could spend the rest of my life
listening to music released before 2000". Hyperbole, perhaps to some, but that
is pretty accurate. I am now able to go and "discover" bands from the 70s.

Film is another form of media that behaves in a similar manner. Why would I
need to watch the new remake of movie X when the original is so readily
available, and likely better.

I think the internet has worked to make media and culture diffuse much faster.
Something new and interesting is suddenly everywhere and certain kinds of
surprises, or hype or suspense similar to say, the Beatles landing in the US
in the 60s, would be extraordinarily hard to replicate.

I would though, take a less dour attitude in regards to the future than you
seem to have hinted at. I think society is adjusting to the this bombardment
of entertainment, a more more people live fulfilling lives mostly detached
from social media, you just won't find them on facebook :-).

------
wizzzzzy
Isn't this also partly due to the post modern nature of fashion and culture
over the last 15 years. Everything seems to be a reference in some form or
another to the preceding 4 decades.

------
ljf
I hate it, but I have fallen into calling the 2000-2009 the 'noughtys' \-
which I first heard on a radio show in 1999 and thought sounded stupid, but
soon stuck for me.

As for the teens... well we are still in them, so yes they are just 'music,
art, etc.' in the same way that I don't say: "So I was talking _English_ to a
friend today..."

------
TomSawyer
Maybe artificially grouping trends by an arbitrary ten year period is what's
weird?

------
roguecoder
I wonder what impact Boomers have on this too. Last year the Boomers finally
lost their status as the biggest generation, so I would expect to see the
importance of the 60's, 70's and 80's begin to decline. At the same time, we
see nostalgia for the 90's starting: Bill Nye, Full House, Surge...

------
coding123
I have a feeling it will come back with the 20's, which will piss off
centenarians. And everyone is going to use the term super early, like I wonder
what the 20's are going to be like. We're going to have self driving cars in
the 20s. They're going to overuse the term, you'll see.

------
sr2
I still see the term 'millennial fashion' and 'the noughties' been thrown
around, but these are meaningless terms. Here's an interesting talk by Adam
Conover debunking the term millennial:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ)

~~~
jamesrcole
doesn't 'the noughties' just mean 2000-2009 (plus or minus one on either end)?

~~~
sr2
Yeah it does, but it's a corruption of the previous attempts at labeling
decades and doesn't really solve the problem of labeling decades. A decade is
actually meaningless in terms of what it represents culturally, and since the
explosion of The Internet, culture is now smeared and has no basis in a decade
anymore. We've reached a post-post-post-post modern era. Rushkoff goes into
this more in his 'present shock' theory
[https://www.theverge.com/2013/3/21/4131130/obsessed-with-
now...](https://www.theverge.com/2013/3/21/4131130/obsessed-with-now-douglas-
rushkoff-and-the-threat-of-present-shock)

~~~
jamesrcole
Sometimes you just want to refer to a granular period of time -- e.g. "I was
living in Alaska in the noughties" or "It wasn't until the noughties that I
decided what I really wanted to do in my career" \-- and as far as that goes
such a term can be useful.

~~~
sr2
Fair point. I get funny looks when I say something like this though: "I was
living in Alaska in the holocene era". See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar)

------
hysan
Perhaps this is the result of increased computing power, search engine use,
and the internet in the 2000s. Since computers can now let you automatically
organize, tag, and find any kind of music you want, there's less need to
manually break down music into larger categories for organization. Combine
this with YouTube and social media dictating what's popular or has gone viral,
and you end up with a generation of consumers that sees movies, fashion,
movies, and culture more as a constantly moving trend than something that
stays static for a long period of time.

------
JumpCrisscross
Were cultural memes grouped by decade before radio? Seems like these standard
groupings were a product of a broadcast media that doesn't exist to normalise
patterns anymore.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Were cultural memes grouped by decade before radio?

The earliest popular decade association I am aware of is the "gay 90s" image
of the 1890s, which apparently was popularized in print media in the 1920s,
roughly concurrent with (but independent of) the emergence of commercial
radio. So, perhaps not _before_ radio, but also not originally _driven by_
radio, either.

------
jarjoura
It's pretty amazing, I can watch a movie from 1997 and feel transformed to a
different time. Also people went into rooms to use phones attached to the
wall, and computers took up entire desks.

Though funny enough, I think fashion from then is coming back in style. It was
very clearly the last year before everyone got all caught up in 60s revival
fashion with Austin Powers.

I don't get that same feeling if I look at movies and photos from 2007.
Everything looks the same as today.

------
irrational
I can remember during the later half of the 90s people started asking how we
would refer to the first two decades of the new millennium since we were so
used to talking about the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Here we are 20+ years later
and there still isn't an answer! The people 2097 are going to be writing
articles about how much we suck for not figuring this out for them ;-)

~~~
archie_peach
I always thought it was the Noughties and the Teenies?

~~~
irrational
I've never heard of those terms, but I like Noughties. "Do you remember
getting naughty in the Noughties?"

------
wmichelin
Go watch any music video from 2000 to 2005, there definitely is a style of the
time, that is distinguishable from the style of today.

~~~
douche
Back in that twilight era when there were music videos for most hit songs, and
MTV was actually still showing them. People are going to be amazed at what a
big deal TRL and Carson Daly were.

Some of those videos from that era were really elaborate, almost short films.
Now we seem to have largely gone back to a more 80s-style, where the bands
just perform.

------
strin
My theory is based on the Internet.

First, people are now exposed to vastly more information that in 80s or 90s.
This forges the diversity in taste and segregation of pop culture.

Second, trends come and go at faster cycle than before. If something on
Youtube goes viral, this could be in pop culture for weeks and then vanished
in the shadow of another fad.

------
andruby
Here on Belgian radio, we call the music from 2000-2010 the "Nillies". As in
"Back to the 90s & Nillies" [0]. As for 2010-2020, I'm sure we'll just call
them the Dixies in a few years.

[0] [http://www.the90s.be/](http://www.the90s.be/)

------
squozzer
I think in ye olden days there was a deliberate attempt by someone -- the
shadowy world of cultural illuminati, maybe - to segment by decade, even
though I never remember any directives saying, "It's now 1980 -- please burn
all of your stuff that dates from 1979 or earlier."

------
arkaic
I think this coincides with the rise of the Internet. With information,
discussions, and media of the past 20 years being instantly accessible, the
disconnect from looking at the past is really tenuous or it doesn't exist
anymore, and everything just sort of melds together.

------
a_c
what if there isn't a well known term to describe this period?

For instance, I have never heard of "noughties"

[https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/107437/there-
are-70s...](https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/107437/there-
are-70s-80s-and-90s-how-do-you-describe-the-years-from-2000-00s)

------
sethrin
I don't know about the teens, but the first decade of this century definitely
needs to be the 'naughties'.

------
tudorizer
I wonder if in the 1900s they had the same issues...

~~~
leg100
I think they did. We talk of the 20's, 30s, right up to 90s, but not of the
decades 1900-1909 and 1910-19.

Having said that, up til around then, times were grouped by the reigning
monarch, at least in Britain: Georgian, Victorian, then Edwardian to cover
1901-WWI.

~~~
ashark
"Turn of the century" isn't only used for 1900-1909, but is sometimes used in
that rôle.

------
SpeakMouthWords
The bottom line says "and and"

------
falsedan
Where's the joke. Give me my funnies, internet laughman

~~~
falsedan
I am doing much out loud, but no laughing? What kind of a comic is this?!

