Popular culture: stuck on repeat

Posted at 9:56 AM on December 9, 2011 by Marianne Combs (0 Comments)
Filed under: Criticism, Culture

In the January 2012 issue of Vanity Fair, Kurt Anderson (host of public radio's Studio 360) writes that popular culture is stuck on repeat, and that we really haven't changed much at all in the last 20 years.

...try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992. Movies and literature and music have never changed less over a 20-year period. Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey--both distinctions without a real difference--and Jay-Z and Wilco are still Jay-Z and Wilco. Except for certain details (no Google searches, no e-mail, no cell phones), ambitious fiction from 20 years ago (Doug Coupland's Generation X, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, Martin Amis's Time's Arrow) is in no way dated, and the sensibility and style of Joan Didion's books from even 20 years before that seem plausibly circa-2012.

Anderson blames this cultural plateau to the overwhelming changes in technology:

In some large measure, I think, it's an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we're experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we're maxed out. So as the Web and artificially intelligent smartphones and the rise of China and 9/11 and the winners-take-all American economy and the Great Recession disrupt and transform our lives and hopes and dreams, we are clinging as never before to the familiar in matters of style and culture.

What do you think? Is there nothing new in the world? Is this just a swing of the pendulum, or this there something more substantial at work?

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