Decades.

People seem to be in a tizzy about “Why are the more recent decades of 2000-2009 or 2010-2020 not as perfectly defined as the early decades?” For instance, you can glance at any picture from the 50, 60, 70, 80 or 90s and have an almost 100% hit rate when it comes to knowing which decade it was when the photo was taken: dirty hippies are the 60s, if there’s yellow shag carpeting it’s the 70s, everybody in the 80s wore neon suits with shoulder pads in them and on and on and on. But there’s been some consternation about the fact that when we look at picture from 2002, except for existing technology it pretty much looks exactly the same as today, nobody looks at a generic photo from the last 25 years & immediately knows if it was in the 2000-2009 decade or the 2010-2020 decade (and I’m pretty certain the same will be said about our current decade).

My guess would be pretty much the same as for anything else these days: the internet/smartphones/social media etc.

Until about 25 years ago, we were all fed a monoculture that was somehow agreed upon by the powers that be, and that monoculture was only controlled by a small group. So at some point in the early 1980s someone in the media, be it television or magazines or both, decided “the 80s” were people in leg warmers and neon hair gel bouncing around to A-Ha. All of this was fed to us in real time as the decade rolled on, and after a coupla years of being bombarded with the same “this is the 1980s!” everywhere, when 1990 came and it was time to do a “That was the 1980s!” decade wrap-up it was fairly easy to do – just grab whatever images and sayings we’d seen coming at us at all times by this minuscule group of people in Hollywood/Los Angeles/NYC from 1980-1989 and VOILA! That’s what will be forever presented as having been “The 80s!”

Of course all throughout the 80s, I never really knew anybody who was in leg warmers and neon hair gel bouncing around to A-Ha; to be honest 1979 pretty much ran into 1990 and within my own life, other than some of those being my teenage years and so everything FEELS like it was so dramatic, any photo of me in my natural environs from, say, 1975 to 1995 could pretty much be seen as possibly being from the 70s or the 80s or the 90s. Nothing about the way me, my friends or any of the buildings etc. we were in & out of throughout the day looked like the “This Was the 80s!” things you’d see everywhere. But it doesn’t really matter, since by then the neatly-wrapped-up-in-a-box-all-neat-and-tidy-for-presentation “This is the 80s!” had taken hold such a hold as a visual avatar for the decade we all signed off on it and moved on, same as we had in the 70s and as we would in the 90s.

But since the advent of the Internet/social media and smartphones ensuring everybody has cameras with them at all times, we’re bombarded by EVERYBODY at all times every day with photos of all of us in real time, so there’s never a need for anybody to present us with a big “This was the 2010s!” wrap-up because we’ve all been cataloguing everything all along the way - it’s like when a friend loses a ton of weight – if you haven’t seen them in 10 years, you’d be shocked to suddenly see them without all the weight, and in your mind they’ll always be framed with a definite BEFORE/AFTER scenario; meanwhile if you’re seeing them every day while you’d notice the weight loss, you wouldn’t consider there to be any real beginning or ending or even defining moment or look other than the normal, gradual changes that occur in real time over the course of a decade. The need or desire to define each decade with a breezy catch-all cultural look & feel meant to be memorable went out the window the minute we ALL became the powers that be when deciding exactly what that looks like which, like a highlighter pen that highlights everything on a page as being remarkable therein renders everything on the page as being ironically unremarkable, turns out to be not very memorable after all.