Did social trends have longer lifespans back then than now? - ITT: zoomer complaining about other zoomers.

[Evil Enchilada]

We currently live in an era where we feel nostalgic over trends that happened only 5 years ago. Do you think the reason why zoomers are so fucked up is because they're forced to adapt to a new cultural attitude once every few years?

 

[jje100010001]

TBH everything is devolving into a multicolored mush (since nothing can be truly forgotten & rediscovered anymore) and as a result, I don't think an era's 'aesthetic' or 'atmosphere' will be as strong anymore.

As such I think that you're right on that regards, that it could be because they take far less time to arise and fall, that a trend can't be taken to its limits and is as such, far weaker- and may not be able to truly innovate beyond the reheating of old tropes.

People have theorized that the wheels on the culture machine first started coming loose by the late 90s, and had completely fallen off by the mid-2000s.

 

[Doppio Vinegar]

I think the main thing is that current social trends are far more degenerative than prior trends. Zoomers are being forced into a consoomer lifestyle where all they want to do is sit on their ass, buy the latest thing, and scroll through the same social media that tells them being straight, white, cisgendered, and religious is basically the equivalent of being the Antichrist. When I was 12 years old, I was playing on my Wii in the living room instead of being groomed to wear thigh highs and chokers on Discord.

 

[melty chocolate]

I'm a millennial and I find the nostalgia for stuff from five years ago very weird. I don't know if it's a zoomers thing because I'm pretty sure I've seen millennials do it too but it's definitely bizarre.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Nah. There have always been flash-in-the-pan trends. Fads are nothing new.

 

[Underperforming]

Maybe they were always short and we are just more attentive to fad length because we see the rise and fall so clearly from constant communication.

 

[Deadwaste]

member when memes would only last a few days before being irrelevant and now memes are lasting longer prolly cuz of coverd? i member

 

[Sperghetti]

I think part of it might be you guys just getting older in general. Now you know why old people always seem so out-of-touch: Five years is no longer a significant portion of your life span like it was when you were still in high school. (Hey, wasn’t it just a few years ago that you kids were all into Justin Beiber and making those little rubber band bracelets?)

I will say that the emphasis on social issues these days is making things like conversational etiquette change at a truly bizarre rate. I shouldn’t have to be in my 30’s and feel like I’m basically somebody’s Jim Crow-era grandma, but here we are.

 

[Dom Cruise]

In my opinion shit has actually slowed down culture wise.

Compare 2001 to 2006 or 2006 to 2011 for what a difference 5 years used to make, now compare 2016 to 2021, people still have dyed hair, piercings, just generally look like the same ugly faggots they did in 2016, the only actual difference would be stuff like WuFlu masks.

 

[Looney Troons]

No. The 90s were chock full of stupid fads that cost parents hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars only for the item to be shelved forever. The 90s and 2000s fads really seemed more materialistic though. People clamor onto dumb memes nowadays and I honestly don’t know which is worse.

Three come to mind:

Furby - holy shit. The most annoying, and probably one of the most profitable and shortest lasting fads ever. People were literally forming mobs to acquire these unintelligent talking bird things. They were impossible for find for weeks, and like the dot com bubble, they became over produced and unwanted.

Tamagotchi - these dumb things were hugely popular in the school grounds, and then were forgotten because they did absolutely nothing.

Pogs - about as long-lasting as the Simpsons episode where Milhouse trades Bart’s soul for some pogs depicting characters from Alf. You could find these things everywhere for purchase and they seemed to show up, and subsequently disappear, overnight.

 

[Niggernerd]

Funny enough i remember there was a ed edd n eddy episode about this.

 

[Haim Arlosoroff]

In 1800 if someone caught you fucking their wife, you have almost a month to run your ass out of the already out-of-the-way place you called home lest the man show up via a canal boat.
In 1850 if someone caught you fucking their wife, you have almost a week to run your ass out of a town organized by a narrow gauge railroad you called home lest the man show up on the next train from Silverton.
In 1900 if someone caught you fucking their wife, you have almost a day to run your ass out of the inner city apartment you called home lest the man show up via a streetcar line in from the suburbs.
In 1950 if someone caught you fucking their wife, you have almost a hour to run your ass out of the neighboring suburbia you called home lest the man show up via his car.
In 2000 if someone caught you fucking their wife, you would find out from the man showing up at your door.
In 2020 if someone caught you texting their wife, you would find out from the man showing up at your door.

Likewise, presidents used to be able to have happy hour because even during Pearl Harbor there was subordinates to do that sort of reaction at least until you sobered up. Nowadays not even drunks can escape texts and tweets asking for a response once they're infamous over some damn stupid thing.

Memes are just reflective of how hurried and haggard our lives have unnaturally become, we're just burnt out raw nerves looking for "too much at once" again so that we feel something in our overdone social lives. That and because we've adopted a hyper-polite society we've needed a way of being honest with each other so memetic humor and collective frivolity are our only entertainment today. Internal passports are only going to make that worse.

That and most people's politics are a joke.

 

[Ghost of Wesley Willis]

Consider this, algorithms have taken over twitter, YouTube, and social media in general. You can thank algorithms for making the lifespan of almost anything much shorter than it used to, before it comes back as 'ironic', like Big Chungus. It used to feel natural whenever something like a new meme came about. Look at rage comics and advice animals, they lasted for years before dying out from over exposure and just becoming stale and irrelevant.

 

[Kujo Jotaro]

Technology specifically the advent of instant messaging services and systems has accelerated culture in ways the creators of such systems never could've imagined. Go back and read letters written in the past, you'll find (particularly with person's in power) that they eagerly want to know what the latest goings on are in the area the recipient resides; these letters may have taken days if not weeks to reach their destination, and a response will have taken just as much time to arrive if not more. Newspapers, telegrams, telephones all of these helped to spread information faster, but at best they were one way mass communication vectors or 1:1 communication vectors. They paled in comparison to the internet and its ability to connect individuals at a mass scale; one could create a group chat of their friends in the local area and send them news about a current event then receive all of their input immediately, or one could create a group chat of people all over the country and repeat the process.

Ideas spread faster than ever in modernity, and ideas are the driving force of culture. In the past a new Idea even a particularly tantalizing one could take decades to sink into a culture or be rejected; today it seems that almost over night a new wave of ideas and values can sweep a nation. People love this and participate in it because they love novelty, who needs these old fashion values and ideas when there's shiny new one's right over there? As a consequence not only are new ideas being churned out constantly, but they're thrown aside for newer toys before anyone has bothered to sit down and tinker with them, to see if they hold any merit at all. The entire cultrual framework of modernity is built on a patchwork of loosely connected ideas that when looked into with any rigor quickly crumble, they cannot stand any scrutiny and it's likely they wont see any if things continue as is.

 

[Rupin]

I'm a millennial and I find the nostalgia for stuff from five years ago very weird. I don't know if it's a zoomers thing because I'm pretty sure I've seen millennials do it too but it's definitely bizarre.

that trend started with the Millennials and it carried over to the Zoomers. It’s just that people are being bombarded with so much media these days and stuff just gets lost in the shuffle that it’s easy to get nostalgic over it because they feel like they can’t get it back or they want to recreate that feeling that particular thing brought them. Zoomers experience nostalgia much quicker because what‘s cool or fashionable is changing at a lightening rate compared to previous generations.

 

[Syaoran Li]

I'd say it's a mix of both us getting older and noticing time flying by a lot more quickly and things like social media making trends pop up and burn out way more quickly and frequently than ever before.

 

[celebrityskin]

Nah I swear that the current 'trends' have been going on since like late 2018 (cottage core, Y2K, e-girl etc.)

 

[The Eighth Tsar]

In my opinion shit has actually slowed down culture wise.

Compare 2001 to 2006 or 2006 to 2011 for what a difference 5 years used to make, now compare 2016 to 2021, people still have dyed hair, piercings, just generally look like the same ugly faggots they did in 2016, the only actual difference would be stuff like WuFlu masks.

I feel like 80's, if I were going by decades was the last decade to have any stark differences in culture as compared to the 90's. I was born in the 90's so I can't really can't say much about that decade either. But if you were to show me people in clothes from the 80's 90's 2000's and 2010's all shot with a modern camera. I would probably say the 80's looks the most different, the 90's kind of different but not much, 2000's and onwards, not at all, maybe like frosted tips and stuff, but it really starts to blend together. I feel like you can't point out 2000's and onward culture by decade any longer; just a prediction, but maybe people will start grouping culture by scores and not decades because it has slown down so much.

 

[Certified_Autist]

The fact that we have different "generations" that are culturally distinct from one another is pretty good evidence that social change has sped up. The whole paradigm of Lost generation/Greatest/Silent/Boomer/X/Millenial/Zoomer/etc is a product of rapid cultural evolution alienating generations from each other. Distinct generation categories didn't really exist prior to the 20th Century. (As far as I know, but I'm a dumb zoomer)

A commoner born in 1750 in, say, England (just as an example) would have a very similar upbringing and cultural background to his grandson born in 1800. But now culture is evolving so fast that a Boomer born in 1950 will have a very different life experience and culture compared to a Zoomer born in 2000, even if they both were born in the same town.

To go off on a bit of a tangent, another sign of rapid cultural change is how we divide up different cultural eras. We now (especially in the West) do it by decade (70s, 80s, 90s, etc). But most nations used to do it by reigning monarch, such as the Victorian Era or Edwardian era, for England. The Bible frequently denotes a time period based on who was King at the time. The Romans had a method similar to the British, the Japanese I believe still have an official tradition of dividing periods by the reigning emperor.

 

[Scaramouche]

I think modern social trends have a shorter lifespan due to the rise of social media and physical media like magazines dying out, but it feels like this problem has gotten even worse ever since TikTok started getting popular.

Trends I've seen get popular on TikTok (and to a lesser extent, Depop) only ever seem to last a few months; fairycore, Coconut Girl, those pearl Vivienne Westwood chokers etc. all feel incredibly dated, despite them all being trends for this year. Compare this to trends of the 2010s like those Gucci belts, Ugg boots or rose gold, which lasted several years before dying out and eventually feeling unfashionable.

Speaking as a zoomer myself, I also do think there's more pressure to dress or look a certain way despite the 'inclusivity' movement. If anything, those SJWs/alt kids pushing for individualism and inclusivity are the worst offenders when it comes to judging people based on their appearance.