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this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Other than class interests being the biggest contributor to why Millennials and Gen Z are generally on the same page...
I have to wonder if the whole monoculture phenomenon that internet and social media has taken to a new level might make this trend continue with future generations. Since the early 2000s there has been a sort of flattening of culture, especially since the major social media platforms started actively trying to force all users to see the same content in an effort to stop what they perceive as echo chambers. Between 1950 and 1990 there was a type of monoculture formed by nationally syndicated media but it was carefully curated to be inoffensive or at least relevant in all markets. For example, national evening news tried to stick to reporting on events or issues relevant to all viewers tuning in rather than everyone getting everyone else's local news all at once all the time. Cultural trends now happen everywhere all at once, even slag and vernacular has become homogenized.
There's also an interesting artifact of Cable TV, where Millennials watched way more reruns than anyone else in history, so they know a lot of old shows. When cable TV appeared, there literally wasn't enough content to fill a year of 24/7 TV, so every TV channel had to fill the gap by buying old catalogs of TV from the late 40's through the 80's.
I remember one time when my grandpa said something about Looney Tunes, and paused and started explaining what that was. He couldn't imagine that I watched the same cartoons growing up as he did.
When the Internet took over a lot of video watching, people were suddenly almost never watching any old content, so Zoomers don't know what the fuck Happy Days is or whatever.
My pet theory for a lot of this is that ubiquitous recorded media has given most commercial media an extremely long shelf life, and ubiquitous recorded media didn't really become a thing until about the 70s, so 70s music and TV has simply had more mindshare than anything before it.
The amount of media that continues to be popular today with people born after the media was created is directly related to how easily consumers could access recordings to rewatch/reslisten to the media, so while you might be able to name a couple of silent film stars from the end of the silent era, most people can't name the stars from 10 years earlier in the film industry. And every decade there's more iconic media until the explosion of iconic media with significant staging power from the 60s, 70s and 80s, a time when many Zoomer's grandparents were growing up